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THE INFLUENCE OF 



EMERSON 



THE INFLUENCE OF 
EMERSON 



EDWIN D.° MEAD 



BOSTON 

AMERICAN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION 

1903 



w\ 



75 ik 3 * 



THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS, 

Two Copies Received 

JUN22 1903 

Copy light Entry 

class5 fc, XXc N© 

COPY B. 



Copyright 1903 
American Unitarian Association 



/ 



i'O 



97 



TO 

EDWARD EVERETT HALE 

THE FRIEND OF EMERSON 

THE FRIEND AND AIDER OF A MULTITUDE OF US, 
WHO LOVE HIM AND REVERE HIM 

HE IS OUR BISHOP, AND WE HAVE NOT DONE WITH HIM YET." 



These papers, touching a few of the many influences of 
Emerson, philosophical, religious, literary, and political, 
have served, the last two many times, as public addresses. 
Farts of all of them are twenty years old, and all of them 
have grown in the years. Some parts have changed much 
more than others ,• and if they continued to lie on the table, 
answering calls, for some years yet, all might see greater 
changes still. I have found that fevj studies of Emerson 
bring out his thought and attitude more clearly or impressively 
than those in which we view him in relation to Parker, 
with whom among religious teachers in his time his sym- 
pathies were closest, and to Carlyle, with whom his affinities 
and contrasts are equally striking and didactic. There are 
doubtless repetitions in the papers here and there j and this, 
and much besides, their original character and purpose must 
excuse. They are brought together here, such as they are, in 
the hope that they may do their part, with the many words 
that will be said in this centennial time, to prompt young 
men and women to such new companionship with Emerson 
as shall give them a larger portion of his idealism and 
lofty spirit in religion and philosophy and in the service of 
mankind. 



Contents 

PAGE 

I. The Philosophy of Emerson . . 3 

II. Emerson and Theodore Parker . 91 

III. Emerson and Carlyle . . . . 157 



I 

The Philosophy of Emerson 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF EMERSON 

Transcendentalism is the popular term 
for the philosophy of Emerson, with those 
who recognize that he had a philosophy. & 
Men call him a Transcendentalist, as-they 
called him and his friends sixty years ago. 
He did not like the term, and thought that 
most people who used it knew little about 
what it meant. As commonly used by 
the intelligent man sixty years ago or now, 
and as accepted by Emerson, it is simply 
another word for Idealist. " What is popu- 
larly called Transcendentalism among us," 
he said himself, in the midst of the Tran- 
scendental movement in New England, " is 
Idealism, — Idealism as it appears in 1842." 
" The Idealism of the present day," he said, 
" acquired the name of Transcendental from 
the use of that term by Immanuel Kant, of 
Konigsberg, who replied to the sceptical 
philosophy of Locke, which insisted that 
there was nothing in the intellect which 
was not previously in the experience of 



4 The Influence of Emerson 

the senses, by showing that there was a very 
important class of ideas, or imperative forms, 
which did not come by experience, but 
through which experience was acquired ; 
that these were intuitions of the mind 
itself; and he denominated them Tran- 
scendental forms. The extraordinary pro- 
foundness and precision of that man's 
thinking have given vogue to his nomen- 
clature, in Europe and America, to that 
extent, that whatever belongs to the class 
of intuitive thought is popularly called at 
the present day Transcendental" 

" As thinkers," says Emerson, " mankind 
have ever divided into two sects, Materialists 
and Idealists ; the first class founded on ex- 
perience, the second on consciousness ; they 
perceive that the senses are not final ; they 
give us representations of things, but what 
are the things themselves they cannot tell. 
The materialist insists on facts, on history, 
on the force of circumstances, and the ani- 
mal wants of man ; the idealist, on the 
power of Thought and of Will, on inspira- 
tion, on miracle, on individul culture. The 
idealist concedes all that the other affirms, 



The Philosophy of Emerson 5 

. . . and then asks him for his grounds of 
assurance that things are as his senses repre- 
sent them. But I, he says, affirm facts not 
affected by the illusions of sense, facts which 
are of the same nature as the faculty which 
reports them. ... He does not deny the 
sensuous fact : by no means ; but he will 
not see that alone." 

Most of us have a philosophy of some 
sort, although most of us are not philoso- 
phers. We have known — have we not — 
country parsons not a few who had a far bet- 
ter philosophy than not a few men famous, 
and deservedly so, as original and powerful 
philosophers. It is common enough for 
men to say that Emerson was not a philoso- 
pher ; and they tell us what the titles of a 
man's books must be, the order of his argu- 
ment, and the fashion of his phrase, to make 
him a philosopher. They remark Emer- 
son's own impatience with the metaphysi- 
cians. "What sensible man ever looked 
twice into a metaphysical book?" — to 
which question of his the answer is of 
course: He himself, — not two times, but 
seventy times two ; for Kant and Plato and 



6 The Influence of Emerson 

Plotinus are metaphysicians. They say he 
was a poet, not a philosopher, as if one 
could not be the other, and as if he were 
not many things besides a poet. Plato was 
a poet. The indubitable philosophers have 
chosen many forms. One writes a dialogue 
which he calls " Phaedrus " or " Alciphron," 
another a poem on " The Nature of Things," 
another a treatise on " Prior Analytics " ora 
" Novum Organum," another an " Epistle 
to the Romans," another a " City of God," 
another a " Summa Theologise," another a 
commentary, another a sermon, another a 
book on the Unknowable. The "father 
of philosophy" did not write at all, but 
talked about water or some soul or force in 
water as the original principle of all things. 
The thought and purpose, not the form and 
method, are what determine. The contents 
of poetry are as various as the forms of 
philosophy ; and a man may be a very great 
poet and not properly a philosopher at all. 
But Dante was a philosopher, and Milton and 
Goethe and Browning, — in their poetry and 
out of it, — because their thought is con- 
cerned, as truly as Plato's or Spinoza's, with 



The Philosophy of Emerson 7 

the original principle of things, the great 
problems of the universe and of the soul. 
This was true of Emerson, and true in 
higher and more memorable way than of 
any other poet or thinker of America. He 
was poet plus philosopher ; although he 
would not thank any of us for the argu- 
ment, and although none surely would aver 
that he wrote like Locke or Leibnitz, or 
deny that he chose to fly where some choose 
to walk and some have to. In truth, as 
usual, so here, he has stated his own posi- 
tion far better than any of us could state it 
for him. " I think metaphysics a gram- 
mar," he said in his first lecture on " The 
Natural History of Intellect," "to which, 
once read, we seldom return. My meta- 
physics are to the end of use. This watch- 
ing of the intellect, in season and out of sea- 
son, to see the mechanics of the thing, is a 
little of the detective. The analytic process 
is cold and bereaving and, shall I say it? 
somewhat mean, as spying. There is some- 
thing surgical in metaphysics as we treat it. 
Were not an ode a better form ? The poet 
sees wholes and avoids analysis; the meta- 



8 The Influence of Emerson 

physician, dealing as it were with the mathe- 
matics of the mind, puts himself out of the 
way of the inspiration, loses that which is 
the miracle and creates the worship. I think 
that philosophy is still rude and elementary. 
It will one day be taught by poets. The 
poet is in the natural attitude ; he is believ- 
ing, — the philosopher, after some struggle, 
having only reasons for believing. ,, The 
same thought appears in his essay on Plu- 
tarch, — the thought of the menace of an 
exclusive devotion to metaphysics for any 
but the broadest minds. " We are always 
interested in the man who treats the intel- 
lect well. We expect it from the philoso- 
pher — from Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza and 
Kant ; but we know that metaphysical 
studies in any but minds of large horizon 
and incessant aspiration have their dangers. 
One asks sometimes whether a metaphy- 
sician can treat the intellect well. The 
central fact is the superhuman intelligence, 
pouring into us from its unknown fountain, 
to be received with religious awe, and de- 
fended from any mixture of our will. But 
this high Muse comes and goes; and the 



The Philosophy of Emerson 9 

danger is that, when the Muse is wanting, 
the student is prone to supply its place 
with microscopic subtleties and logomachy." 
" Philosophy of the People " was the sub- 
ject of one of his courses of lectures, — per- 
haps a development of the " First Philoso- 
phy " with which his mind was occupied the 
year before he published "Nature"; and 
philosophy of or for the people he felt 
must be concrete and immediately related 
to activity and life. " To great results 
of thought and morals," he said, "the 
steps are not many ; and it is not the 
masters who spin the ostentatious continu- 
ity." Nevertheless, the masters do spin 
continuity, — some of them; and it is well 
for us that they do. The logic of Kant is 
as necessary as the insight of Emerson ; and 
to the one Transcendentalist we pay honor 
as to the other. 

In estimating any philosophy, there is 
nothing which illuminates and tests it better 
than its application to the distinctive ten- 
dencies and problems of the time. How do 
our science and society look in its light, and 
how does it bear theirs? The dominant 



io The Influence of Emerson 

and distinctive doctrine of our time, per- 
vading every field, — nature, physics, psy- 
chology, anthropology, history, politics, 
ethics, and religion, — has been the doctrine 
of evolution. How does the philosophy 
of Emerson dispose of that, and how does 
that deal with it ? 

In speaking of Emerson and the doctrine 
of evolution, there is, of course, no intention 
to imply that we have here an instance of 
the old antithesis between Idealism and Ma- 
terialism. Emerson and Darwin, to name 
the name most conspicuously identified in 
our time with the doctrine of evolution, 
represent no such opposition. It is, indeed, 
scarcely legitimate to speak of Darwin as 
having to do directly with philosophy or the 
problem and original principle of the uni- 
verse at all. He was not a philosopher, but 
a wise student of the processes of nature, 
whose results make immediately neither for 
nor against the principles either of Idealism 
or Materialism, and were urged for and 
against neither. Certainly do not make 
against Idealism, as it is not extravagant 
to say that Darwin's truth lies in Emerson's 



The Philosophy of Emerson n 

philosophy as a natural and essential moment 
of it. Emerson is precisely a philosopher, 
— ever approaching the problem of the 
universe both from the soul-side and the 
nature-side, ever standing, confident and 
patient, in the presence of the sphinx. 
Much more than philosopher, but, as I 
have said, essentially philosopher, and our 
greatest, perhaps our only great, philosopher. 
" The poet," he says, " differs from the 
philosopher only herein, that the one pro- 
poses Beauty as his main end, the other 
Truth. But the philosopher, not less than 
the poet, postpones the apparent order and 
relations of things to the empire of thought. 
1 The problem of philosophy,' according to 
Plato, c is, for all that exists conditionally, to 
find a ground unconditioned and absolute/ ' 
And it is worthy of noting, when we think 
of Emerson as approaching the world- 
problem from the side of mind and of 
Darwin as a student of the principles of 
nature, that Emerson's own most energetic 
and systematic attempt to find and formu- 
late the absolute ground of things is the 
essay on — not the Soul, but Nature, 



12 The Influence of Emerson 

"All that is separate from us, all which 
philosophy distinguishes as the Not Me, — 
that is, both nature and art, all other men 
and my own body, — must be ranked under 
this name Nature." 

The little book on " Nature " was Emer- 
son's first authentic utterance. It came a 
year before the address on the American 
Scholar, two years before the address to the 
Harvard Divinity School. It came the 
year after the publication of Strauss's Life 
of Jesus. Yet who divined, in the hubbub 
of that tumbling of old sanctions, that in- 
spiration even then was speaking at the 
door, fresh, faithful, positive, and jubilant, 
pausing not so much as to note the collapse 
of images, but simply speaking the word of 
the soul under the soul's eternal forms, with 
the soul's veritable and self-vouching ac- 
cent ? " The foregoing generations beheld 
God and nature face to face; we, through 
their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy 
an original relation to the universe ? Why 
should not we have a poetry and philosophy 
of insight and not of tradition, and a religion 
by revelation to us, and not the history of 



The Philosophy of Emerson 13 

theirs ? Why should we grope among the 
dry bones of the past, or put the living 
generation into masquerade out of its faded 
wardrobe ? The sun shines to-day also. 
There is more wool and flax in the fields." 

It was a still, small voice, this little book, 
which came without its author's name, — still 
as the coming of the green in May-time, — 
and few heard it (five hundred copies of the 
book were disposed of, we are told, only 
after twelve years) ; though as many as 
heard and received it, to them it gave power 
to become the sons of God, to know them- 
selves as such, — a knowledge which had 
become well-nigh lost and unauthentic in 
churches and among men. Its accent was 
almost drowned by the thunder of Carlyle's 
" Sartor Resartus," which Emerson gave to 
America at the same time, to preach, in a 
way so different, the same Everlasting Yea. 

Emerson's first authentic utterance, cc Nat- 
ure " is also the most sufficient expression 
of his general philosophy, and the noblest 
possible expression of a pure idealism, — to 
my thinking, the most penetrating specula- 
tive word yet spoken in our New World. 



14 The Influence of Emerson 

It could almost be wished that there might 
be professorships of this book, " Nature," 
and the correlated essays, in our colleges, — a 
not extravagant wish surely, when we re- 
member in how many professor of philos- 
ophy means for the greater part of the time 
professor of some book so infinitely smaller 
and poorer, by Herbert Spencer or another 
Englishman or William Hamilton or an- 
other Scotchman. I think that any young 
man going out into life with his mind well 
opened to the real intension and extension 
of those views of Nature as Commodity, 
Beauty, Language, and Discipline would 
have more to be grateful for and wherewith 
to turn his chaos into cosmos than all 
chapters on the limits of knowledge, the 
rungs of the ladder, or the classes of the 
faculties can possibly be made to yield. 
What invitations everywhere, and provoca- 
tions, to excursions into the history of 
speculation and of every science ! Where 
should we find a more fruitful text for a 
Kritik of Language, which Max Muller used 
to tell us, with some reason, is the Kritik 
which our philosophy needs next? For 



The Philosophy of Emerson 15 

here we have no mere formal and punctili- 
ous thinking, — improved metric scheme of 
classing Aryan and Semitic roots, — but are 
borne directly to that primary question, why 
and how it is that spirit symbolizes and 
bodies itself in nature and in words, and what 
is the significance and scope of that speech 
which man has evoked from himself and 
which remains, firmly conserving his thought, 
while the generations pass. Only Bushnell 
in New England has thought with equal 
subtlety and fruitfulness upon this question. 
Where better or more natural ground from 
which to consider Darwinism itself and the 
modern statement of development? The 
very motto of " Nature " might well be 
adopted as the tersest and most pregnant 
text for our evolution-philosophy : — 

u A subtle chain of countless rings 
The next unto the farthest brings ; 
The eye reads omens where it goes, 
And speaks all languages the rose ; 
And, striving to be man, the worm 
Mounts through all the spires of form." 

We are brought by " Nature " into con- 






1 6 The Influence of Emerson 

tact with the apostolic succession of the 
lords of thought, from the Egyptians and 
the Brahmins to Bacon and Swedenborg. 
Brought into contact especially with the 
great modern Germans. They are not 
cited ; but " Nature," written fresh from 
the reading of the Germans, of Coleridge 
and Carlyle, is so instinct with the spirit 
and purpose of the Transcendental Philos- 
ophy, that it were well enough to direct the 
mind unsatisfied with the book's own fresh 
and simple word, and craving statement in 
syllogistic *z, b, c, and corollaries of the 
manner of Emerson's approach to the 
world-problem, to the pages of Kant and 
Hegel and Fichte. He takes us, in the 
very beginning, to where Kant leaves us in 
that last page of his Ethics. " If a man 
would be alone, let him look at the stars. . . . 
One might think the atmosphere was made 
transparent with this design, to give man, in 
the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence 
of the sublime. " " Undoubtedly," he says, 
"we have no questions to ask which are 
unanswerable. We must trust the perfec- 
tion of the creation so far as to believe that 



The Philosophy of Emerson 17 

whatever curiosity the order of things has 
awakened in our minds the order of things 
can satisfy." " I maintain," Kant had said, 
in his great Kritik, "that no question re- 
ferring to an object of pure reason can be 
insoluble for the same human reason ; and 
that no excuse of inevitable ignorance on 
our side, or of unfathomable depth on the 
side of the problem, can release us from the 
obligation to answer it thoroughly and com- 
pletely ; because the same concept which 
enables us to ask the question must qualify 
us to answer it, considering that the object 
itself does not exist except in the concept." 
" Beauty," says Emerson in " Nature," " in 
its largest and profoundest sense, is one 
expression for the universe. God is the 
All-fair. Truth and goodness and beauty 
are but different faces of the same All." 
This is another utterance, if we please, of 
that Hegelian principle, that God is Being, 
Essence, Idea, and whether we say this or 
that is not a question of false or true, but 
of completer or less complete definition, 
a question of the gradation of circles and 
of the circumference and penetration of 



1 8 The Influence of Emerson 

the present thought. It should be said in 
general that there is almost nothing new in 
principle in Emerson's philosophy. We 
are everywhere in the same philosophic 
atmosphere which we breathe with Plato 
and Plotinus and with the post-Kantian 
idealists. Everything easily falls into har- 
mony with the great Greeks and the great 
Germans. The fundamental principle of 
"The Natural History of Intellect," that 
" every law of nature is a law of mind," is 
precisely the central principle of Hegel's 
Logic and Philosophy of Nature, there de- 
veloped and applied with a pertinacity and 
rigor entirely foreign to Emerson's inspira- 
tional genius. Emerson's virtue is in il- 
lumination and the immediate marriage of 
the truth clearly apprehended to poetry and 
life. 

At the beginning of the chapter on Ideal- 
ism in cf Nature," Emerson speaks with 
kindness and with warmth of the extreme 
subjective theory, for which Fichte stood in 
the first period of his thought, — or, indeed, 
for the very illusionism of Berkeley, — and 
condemns the frivolous who make merry with 



The Philosophy of Emerson 19 

the theory, as if its consequences were bur- 
lesque and as if it affected the stability of 
nature. Fichte, viewing all human life as 
moral evolution, conceived the outer world 
as the mere ethical gymnasium provided for 
the mind and belonging to it by its very 
constitution. "A noble doubt," Emerson 
says, "perpetually suggests itself, whether 
the end of Discipline be not the Final Cause 
of the Universe, — and whether nature out- 
wardly exists. It is a sufficient account of 
that Appearance we call the World, that 
God will teach a human mind, and so makes 
it the receiver of a certain number of con- 
gruent sensations, which we call sun and 
moon, man and woman, house and trade. 
What difference does it make whether Orion 
is up there in heaven, or some god paints 
the image in the firmament of the soul ? " 
" To the senses and the unrenewed under- 
standing," he says, " belongs a sort of in- 
stinctive belief in the absolute existence of 
nature. Things are ultimates. But the 
presence of Reason mars this faith. Time 
and space relations vanish as laws are known. 
The first effort of thought tends to relax 



20 The Influence of Emerson 

the despotism of the senses, and shows us 
nature aloof and, as it were, afloat." This 
is Hegel's Phenomenologie in other dialect. 
Turgot said, "He that has never doubted 
the existence of matter may be assured he 
has no aptitude for metaphysical inquiries." 
" It is the uniform effect of culture on the 
human mind," says Emerson, tc not to shake 
our faith in the stability of particular phe- 
nomena," — any distrust of the permanence 
of laws, he says, would paralyze the faculties 
of man, — " but to lead us to regard nature 
as a phenomenon, not a substance." Ideas, 
he says, — speaking in Platonic phrase, — 
immortal, necessary, uncreated natures, are 
accessible to few men, as objects of science, 
although all men are capable of being raised 
by piety or by passion into their region ; 
and in their presence " we think of nature as 
an appendix to the soul." " Both religion 
and ethics," he says, cc put nature under foot. 
The first and last lesson of religion is, c The 
things that are seen are temporal ; the things 
that are unseen are eternal/ " 

To a pure subjective idealism, however, 
Emerson does not commit himself, either in 



The Philosophy of Emerson 21 

" Nature " or anywhere else. At the very 
beginning he saw clearly the full circle which 
it took Fichte his whole lifetime to describe, 
and the Universal Spirit, constituting and 
informing all individuals, as all nature, is as 
distinctly recognized and fundamental in this 
first utterance as in u Worship " and " The 
Over-Soul," or as in Fichte's " Way to the 
Blessed Life." " Idealism," he says, — 
subjective idealism, — " acquaints us with the 
total disparity between the evidence of our 
own being and the evidence of the world's 
being. The one is perfect ; the other in- 
capable of any assurance. . . . Yet, if Ideal- 
ism only deny the existence of matter, it 
does not satisfy the demands of the spirit. 
It leaves God out of me. Then the heart 
resists it, because it balks the affections in 
denying substantive being to men and 
women. Nature is so pervaded with human 
life, that there is something of humanity in 
all, and in every particular. But this theory 
makes nature foreign to me, and does not 
account for that consanguinity which we 
acknowledge in it." Its significance and 
value, therefore, for Emerson, are simply 



ii The Influence of Emerson 

this : that it serves " to apprise us of the 
eternal distinction between the soul and the 
world," vouching the mind to be of the 
fundamental nature of things. But a com- 
plete philosophy demands much more. 
Emerson's own philosophy goes much be- 
yond. Would we have a just statement, in 
one word, of that philosophy, we have it in 
this same " Nature." I know of no other 
passage where so much of his fundamental 
thought is so well balanced and compacted 
as in this following : — 

" Man is conscious of an universal soul 
within or behind his individual life, wherein, 
as in a firmament, the natures of Justice, 
Truth, Love, Freedom, arise .and shine. 
This universal soul he calls Reason : it is 
not mine or thine, or his, but we are its ; 
we are its property and men. And the blue 
sky in which the private earth is buried, the 
sky with its eternal calm, and full of ever- 
lasting orbs, is the type of Reason. That 
which, intellectually considered, we call Rea- 
son, considered in relation to nature, we call 
Spirit. Spirit is the creator. Spirit hath 
life in itself. And man in all ages and 



The Philosophy of Emerson 23 

countries embodies it in his language, as the 
Father." 

Nature, to Emerson, " always speaks of & 
Spirit. . . It is a great shadow pointing al- 
ways to the sun behind us." " The aspect 
of nature is devout. Like the figure of 
Jesus, she stands with bended head, and 
hands folded upon the breast. . . . The 
noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the 
apparition of God. It is the organ through 
which the universal spirit speaks to the indi- 
vidual, and strives to lead back the individ- 
ual to it." " The world proceeds from the 
same spirit as the body of man. It is a re- 
moter and inferior incarnation of God, a 
projection of God in the unconscious. But 
it is not, like the body, now subjected to the 
human will. Its serene order is inviolable 
by us. It is therefore, to us, a fixed point 
whereby we may measure our departure. 
We are as much strangers in nature as we 
are aliens from God." 

This last thought Emerson returns to 
more than once. " Man is fallen," he says, 
in a later essay ; fC nature is erect and serves 
as a differential thermometer, detecting the 



24 The Influence of Emerson 

presence or absence of the divine sentiment 
in man. By fault of our dulness and self- 
ishness we are looking up to nature, but 
when we are convalescent nature will look 
up to us. We see the foaming brook with 
compunction : if our own life flowed with 
the right energy, we should shame the 
brook." 

An embodiment of God, — this, then, is 
what the universe is to Emerson. " There 
seems to be a necessity in spirit," he says, 
" to manifest itself in material forms ; and 
day and night, river and storm, beast and 
bird, acid and alkali pre-exist in necessary 
Ideas in the mind of God, and are what they 
are by virtue of preceding affections in the 
world of spirit." " In the divine order," he 
says, in the address on " The Method of 
Nature," " intellect is primary ; nature, sec- 
ondary ; it is the memory of the mind. 
That which once existed in intellect as pure 
law has now taken body as Nature. It ex- 
isted already in the mind in solution ; now, 
it has been precipitated, and the bright sedi- 
ment is the world." This is pure Plato. 
Nature he views purely as the projection 



The Philosophy of Emerson 25 

and symbol of spirit. " Every natural fact 
is a symbol of some spiritual fact." " Every 
object rightly seen unlocks a new faculty 
of the soul." If you wish to understand 
intellectual philosophy, he said, study nat- 
ural science. Every time you discover a law 
of things you discover a principle of mind. 
Every law of nature, he said, in his lectures 
on the "Natural History of the Intellect," is 
a law of mind ; and it is quite indifferent, he 
said boldly, in a connection where he would 
not be misunderstood, whether we say " all 
is matter " or " all is spirit." For to him 
matter is all spiritualized, is spirit's other. 
Carlyle, it will be remembered, had a certain 
kindness, as opposed to the old dualism, to 
" your frightful theory of materialism, of 
man's being but a body, and therefore at 
least once more a unity." This, he said, 
may be the paroxysm which was critical, and 
the beginning of cure. 

This thought, that everything in the phe- 
nomenal world takes place at once mechan- 
ically and metaphysically, — the source of 
the mechanical, however, being in the meta- 
physical, — was a constant and fundamental 



26 The Influence of Emerson 

thought with Emerson. " A perfect paral- 
lelism," he says, almost in the words of 
Leibnitz, and exactly in the thought of 
Hegel, " exists between nature and the 
laws of thought/ ' " The whole of nature 
agrees with the whole of thought." Pre- 
cisely herein, indeed, is Emerson's key to 
the interpretation of nature, as we shall con- 
sider more carefully. " Things are know- 
able/' he says, in the essay on Plato, " be- 
cause, being from one, things correspond. 
There is a scale ; and the correspondence of 
heaven to earth, of matter to mind, of the 
part to the whole, is our guide." He elab- 
orates the thought in many ways in " The 
Natural History of Intellect." " I believe 
the mind is the creator of the world, and is 
ever creating ; that at last Matter is dead 
Mind ; that mind makes the senses it sees 
with ; that the genius of man is a continu- 
ation of the power that made him and that 
has not done making him." Again, in a 
passage of wonderful boldness : " As the 
sun is conceived to have made our system 
by hurling out from itself the outer rings of 
diffuse ether which slowly condensed into 



The Philosophy of Emerson 27 

earths and moons, by a higher force of the 
same law the mind detaches minds, and a 
mind detaches thoughts or intellections. 
These again all mimic in their sphericity 
the first mind, and share its power." As 
he reasons forward, so he reasons backward. 
" From whatever side we look at Nature we 
seem to be exploring the figure of a dis- 
guised man." Nature is pervaded with 
human nature. Man finds himself every- 
where : humanity is the translator of nature 
and of God. Of all philosophers and theo- 
logians, he is, in a high but most real sense, 
the most anthropomorphic. Does he make 
us feel as almost no other the divinity of 
man ? So does he see most penetratingly 
the humanity of God. Man is the divine 
revealer and interpreter. The poet, the 
prophet, the high thinker, the Christs of 
God, the completest flowerings of the divine 
process and life, — these are the real medi- 
ators with the divine Original. 

The source of Nature in Universal Spirit, 
says Emerson, is betrayed by that intimate 
unity which so pervades all its forms as to 
make each particle a microcosm, which faith- 



28 The Influence of Emerson 

fully renders the likeness of the world. In 
"The Sphinx," the first poem of his first 
collection, thirty years before Tennyson 
made his most compact expression of the 
central truth, — 

" Flower in the crannied wall, . . . 
Little flower — but if I could understand 
What you are, root and all, and all in all, 
I should know what God and man is," — 

Emerson had put it in this wise : — 

" Through a thousand voices 
Spoke the universal dame : 
Who telleth one of my meanings 
Is master of all I am." 

" A leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of 
time," says Emerson in " Nature," " is related 
to the whole, and partakes of the perfection 
of the whole." " The granite is differenced 
in its laws only by the more or less of heat 
from the river that wears it away. The 
river, as it flows, resembles the air that flows 
over it; the air resembles the light which 
traverses it with more subtile currents ; the 
light resembles the heat which rides with it 
through space. Each creature is only a 



The Philosophy of Emerson 29 

modification of the other/' To this great 
fact of the correlation and the transmutation 
of forces he returns ever, — and to the truth 
beyond, that all force is quickly driven where 
it must be spoken of ideally, in terms of 
thought, of will and intellect. He observes 
how the law of harmonic sounds reappears 
in the harmonic colors. He dwells with 
interest on the fact that that picture which 
we have of outer nature is no more condi- 
tioned by the landscape than by the eye 
itself. The structure of this it is which 
determines outline, color, motion, and group- 
ing. Nature, too, is always herself plus our- 
self : we are always inextricably interwoven 
as one element, larger or smaller, in the sum 
total of impression. In scientific mood we 
reduce the personal element to the vanishing 
point ; but in naive and common life nature 
" always wears the colors of the spirit." 
" The same scene which yesterday breathed 
perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the 
nymphs is overspread with melancholy to- 
day. To a man laboring under calamity, 
the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. 
There is a kind of contempt of the landscape 



30 The Influence of Emerson 

felt by him who has just lost by death a dear 
friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts 
down over less worth in the population. ,, 

" There is nothing lucky or capricious 
in these analogies," says Emerson. " This 
relation between the mind and matter is not 
fancied by some poet, but stands in the will 
of God, and so is free to be known by all 
men. It appears to men, or it does not 
appear. A ray of relation passes from all 
other being to man ; and neither can man be 
understood without these objects, nor these 
objects without man." 

As with the intellectual, so* too, with the 
moral. " The laws of moral nature," says 
Emerson, " answer to those of matter as face 
to face in a glass." This thought was funda- 
mental in his ethics, and he lost no good 
occasion to emphasize and urge it. It was 
part of that grand creed which he spoke 
from the platform of the Free Religious 
Association a generation ago : " The moral 
sentiment speaks to every man the law after 
which the universe was made." It was the 
last word of the famous Harvard address of 
1838: " I look for the new Teacher, that 



The Philosophy of Emerson 31 

shall follow so far those shining laws, that he 
shall see them come full circle ; shall see the 
world to be the mirror of the soul ; shall see 
the identity of the law of gravitation with 
purity of heart ; and shall show that the 
Ought, that Duty, is one thing with Science, 
with Beauty, and with Joy." It is hinted in 
" The Preacher," which, read to the Har- 
vard students of religion forty years after the 
first address, somehow echoes every senti- 
ment of that : " The next age will recog- 
nize the true eternity of the law, its presence 
to you and me, its equal energy in what is 
called brute nature as in what is called sacred 
history." But the whole thought was already 
firmly grasped and clearly formulated in 
" Nature." " All things are moral," he said 
here, " and in their boundless changes have 
an unceasing reference to spiritual nature." 
" Every natural process is a version of a 
moral sentence. The moral law lies at the 
centre of nature and radiates to the circum- 
ference." Every chemical change, every 
change of vegetation, every animal function, 
" shall hint or thunder to man the laws of 
right and wrong and echo the Ten Com- 



32 The Influence of Emerson 

mandments." He cannot doubt that the 
moral sentiment which thus scents the air, 
grows in the grain, and impregnates the 
waters of the world is caught from them by- 
man. " Who can guess," he says, " how 
much firmness the sea-beaten rock has taught 
the fisherman ? how much tranquillity has 
been reflected to man from the azure sky, 
over whose unspotted deeps the winds for 
evermore drive flocks of stormy clouds, and 
leave no wrinkle or stain ? how much indus- 
try and providence and affection we have 
caught from the pantomime of brutes ? " 
The whole chapter upon Discipline is iter- 
ation and reiteration of this thought. Nature 
is a discipline, he says, — school alike for the 
understanding and for morals. As Fichte 
said, Nature is the objectified material of 
duty. 

The notion is abroad, and is fashionable 
almost to the point of orthodoxy, — reports 
itself perennially in the newspaper and the 
omnibus, — that Idealism is unpractical, 
without hands, careless of fact, even inimical 
to exact science. Renan has said that every 
position has so much to say for itself and is 



The Philosophy of Emerson 33 

so plausible from some point that, could a 
man live long enough with his mind fresh 
and virile, he would doubtless champion 
successively every doctrine and belong to 
every sect. Thus for each one of us may be 
reserved the mumps-and-measles period of 
a believed antinomy between piety and com- 
mon sense and between thought and fact. 
Lowell well said, with specific reference to 
the Pilgrim Fathers, the most energetic ship- 
load of idealists in history, that " men anxious 
about their souls have not been by any 
means the least skilful in providing for the 
wants of the body " ; and Switzerland, Hol- 
land, Scotland, and England say their various 
Amens. " To a sound judgment," says 
Emerson, " the most abstract truth is the 
most practical." The word of your rigorous 
and vigorous henchman of " fact " is : Come 
down from the barren heights of speculation 
and out of the clouds, to the firm ground of 
the physical and positive. Shut your Kritik 
of Reason and open your Palaeontology, 
that so we may have some reliable and useful 
knowledge. In like manner we hear sincere 
and earnest men counsel, Give up belief in 



34 The Influence of Emerson 

God, that you may economize your forces 
for humanity ; give up believing in the im- 
mortal nature of you, that so you may con- 
centrate on a new earth. They think the 
law of parsimony rules the soul, instead of 
that other, that to him that hath shall be 
given, and that giving is getting and qualify- 
ing for giving more. Stop this sending of 
gospel and schoolmaster to Asia and Africa 
and the black belt of Alabama, they say, and 
attend to the ignorance and squalor round 
the corner ; and they ridicule the missionary 
society. Yet they have to blush more than 
this other when asked for the census of their 
own neighborhood activities and self-sacrifices 
and for the page of their cash-book which 
chronicles their dealings with the local vice. 

The positivisms appeal to the idealist to 
leave his idealism to strengthen the ranks of 
reform and regenerate society is irony 's ne 
plus ultra. Its answer is Moses and the 
prophets ; its answer is Christ and the 
Church ; its answer is Luther and Calvin 
and John Knox ; its answer is Cromwell and 
Milton and Vane, Plymouth Rock, and Bun- 
ker Hill ; its answer is Rousseau and Turgot, 



The Philosophy of Emerson 35 

the voice of Fichte amidst Napoleon's drums, 
Cobden and the Corn-law Rhymer, Mazzini 
and Gladstone ; its answer is Garrison, the 
Emancipation Proclamation, and the scaffold 
of John Brown ; its answer is the Transcen- 
dental Movement in New England. Never 
in New England, it seems, was such a turn- 
out of men to regenerate society as in those 
two decades. Each man inoculated with the 
" new views " straightway appears with a 
recipe for the divine commonwealth in his 
pocket. It shall come by Brook Farm, by 
eating potatoes, by temperance, by conven- 
tions, — a perennial Anniversary Week, — 
but it shall come somehow. The labor of 
those men and women for a new earth was 
as energetic as their faith in its coming was 
indefectible and buoyant. But for their labor 
and their faith the cause of reform among 
us would be infinitely behind where it is to- 
day. On the whole, it seems to some of us, 
in the light of our own history and thought, 
that, if our social reformers desiderate in the 
people a zeal according to knowledge, they 
had better pray for a new influx of Transcen- 
dentalism rather than seek to minimize what 



36 The Influence of Emerson 

we have. If the time ever should come 
when Transcendentalism should be " at bay " 
in America, — that is the corner where some- 
body in mild glee has recently been locating 
it, — then Reform would simply find that it 
had killed its goose. 

The same answer which is given him who 
seeks to antagonize Idealism and philan- 
thropy stands for him who seeks to show 
a conflict between speculation and science. 
The answer is Aristotle and Bacon, Des- 
cartes and Leibnitz, Kant, Goethe and Em- 
erson. Kant, and not Laplace, was the true 
author of the nebular hypothesis ; and his 
name will ultimately be identified with it as 
completely as Newton's with the law of 
gravitation. He, too, distinctly enunciated 
the doctrine — although he called it " a daring 
adventure of reason " — of the descent of all 
organic beings from a common original 
mother, as an hypothesis which " alone is in 
harmony with the principle of the mechan- 
ism of nature, without which a science of 
nature is altogether impossible.' , Goethe 
said, " Nothing could hinder me from boldly 
maintaining this c adventure of reason/ as 



The Philosophy of Emerson 37 

the sage of Konigsberg calls it " ; and 
Goethe's own " Metamorphosis of Plants," 
his " Metamorphosis of Animals," and the 
whole body of his valuable works in mor- 
phology, biology, and geology are clear an- 
ticipations, and much more than anticipa- 
tions, of Darwinism and our evolution 
theory. " What kind of God," said Goethe, 
" were he who impelled things only from 
outside, and let the universe twirl round his 
finger? God moves the world inwardly, 
cherishes nature in himself, himself in nat- 
ure, so that whatever lives and works and 
exists in him never misses his power nor his 
spirit." And again : " All members form 
themselves according to eternal laws, and the 
rarest form preserves in secret the primitive 
type. The form determines the animal's 
mode of life, while, reciprocally, the mode of 
life reacts powerfully on all form." 

Some have raised the objection that these 
and similar passages of Goethe are no 
" scientific truths," but only poetical or rhe- 
torical flourishes and images ; the type he 
meant was only an " ideal pro-type," no real 
genealogical form. "This objection," says 



38 The Influence of Emerson 

Professor Haeckel, — and the answer, no 
matter what the philosophy behind it, serves 
for similar objections to Emerson, — "be- 
trays little understanding of the greatest 
German genius. He who is acquainted with 
Goethe's thoroughly objective mode of 
thought, who appreciates his thoroughly liv- 
ing and realistic view of nature, will entertain 
no doubt that under that ' type ' was in- 
tended a perfectly real descent of kindred 
organisms from common genealogical form." 
Emerson himself, in describing the great 
changes which came in New England 
thought in the thirties and forties, and ex- 
pressing the opinion that " the paramount 
source of the religious revolution was Mod- 
ern Science," pays special tribute to the in- 
fluence of Goethe and the Germans in the 
matter. " Unexpected aid from high quarters 
came to the iconoclasts. The German poet 
Goethe revolted against the science of the 
day, against French and English science, 
declared war against the great name of 
Newton, proposed his own new and simple 
optics ; in botany, his simple theory of meta- 
morphosis, — the eye of a leaf is all, every 



The Philosophy of Emerson 39 

part of the plant from root to fruit is only a 
modified leaf, the branch of a tree is nothing 
but a leaf whose serratures have become 
twigs. He extended this into anatomy and 
animal life, and his views were accepted. 
The revolt became a revolution. Schelling 
and Oken introduced their ideal natural 
philosophy; Hegel, his metaphysics, and 
extended it to civil history. The result in 
literature and the general mind was a return 
to law." 

This truth, that the great pioneering and 
revolutionizing work in science and the 
study of nature has so commonly been done 
by those who have approached the problem 
of the universe on the thought-side, is cer- 
tainly interesting and significant. To the 
man who thinks, not at all a strange thing, 
yet something surely worth making a note 
of by the stickler for "facts." "Man," says 
Emerson, " carries the world in his head, 
the whole astronomy and chemistry sus- 
pended in a thought. Because the history 
of nature is charactered in his brain, there- 
fore is he the prophet and discoverer of her 
secrets. Every known fact in natural science 



40 The Influence of Emerson 

was divined by the presentiment of some- 
body, before it was actually verified." He 
quotes with pleasure George Herbert's 
quaint and pregnant lines upon man's 
" private amity " with the herbs and the 
stars. He might have quoted those lines of 
Milton, which Channing quotes : — 

" One Almighty is, from whom 
All things proceed, and up to him return, 
If not depraved from good, created all 
Such to perfection, one first matter all 
Indued with various forms, various degrees 
Of substance, and, in things that live, of life : 
But more refined, more spirituous and pure, 
As nearer to him placed or nearer tending, 
Each in their several active spheres assigned, 
Till body up to spirit work, in bounds 
Proportioned to each kind. So from the root 
Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the 

leaves 
More aery, last the bright consummate flower 
Spirits odorous breathes ; flowers and their fruit, 
Man's nourishment, by gradual scale sublimed, 
To vital spirits aspire, to animal, 
To intellectual." 

Paradise Lost, Book V., lines 469-485. 



The Philosophy of Emerson 41 

The following Platonic lines from Milton he 

does quote : — 

" What if earth 
Be but the shadow of Heaven, and things therein 
Each to the other more like than on earth is 
thought ? " 

But nothing could illustrate so strikingly 
the truth that the method of thought is 
the method of nature as what is called 
the " Darwinism " of Emerson himself, — the 
anticipations and clear expression everywhere 
of that view of development which our 
science has adopted and made so cardinal. 
Of this Darwinism in Emerson much has 
been made, yet not too much. Darwin- 
ism, as we have already noticed, was made 
the very motto of " Nature/' twenty years 
before "The Origin of Species " was written. 
" Nature " is full of Darwinism. " It is 
essential to a true theory of nature and of 
man," Emerson said, " that it should con- 
tain somewhat progressive " ; and in the 
essay on " Fate " he says, " No statement 
of the universe can have any soundness 
which does not admit its ascending effort." 
His quick interest in the questions of natural 



42 The Influence of Emerson 

science declares itself in " Nature " as gen- 
uinely as his interest in the soul and life. 
Curiously, his earliest public lectures were 
upon subjects in natural history, — "The 
Relation of Man to the Globe," "Water," 
etc. " Open any recent journal of science," 
he said in " Nature," " and weigh the prob- 
lems suggested concerning Light, Heat, 
Electricity, Magnetism, Physiology, Geol- 
ogy." But he has slight regard for that 
physiology or physics which merely con- 
cerns itself with particulars and heaps up 
facts, with no curiosity or thought concern- 
ing relations, tendency, and end. " Empiri- 
cal science," he says, "is apt to cloud the 
sight and, by the very knowledge of func- 
tions and processes, to bereave the student 
of the manly contemplation of the whole." 
"There are far more excellent qualities in 
the student," he says, " than preciseness and 
infallibility. It is not so pertinent to man 
to know all the individuals of the animal 
kingdom as it is to know whence and 
whereto is this tyrannizing unity in his 
constitution, which evermore separates and 
classifies things, endeavoring to reduce the 



The Philosophy of Emerson 43 

most diverse to one form. When I be- 
hold a rich landscape, it is less to my pur- 
pose to recite correctly the order and super- 
position of the strata than to know why all 
thought of multitude is lost in a tranquil 
sense of unity. I cannot greatly honor 
minuteness in details so long as there is no 
hint to explain the relation between things 
and thoughts ; no ray upon the metaphysics 
of conchology, of botany, of the arts, to 
show the relation of the forms of flowers, 
shells, animals, architecture, to the mind, 
and build science upon ideas." 

The exact sciences were not Emerson's 
favorite field, and what mathematics he had 
cost him " hours of melancholy. " But he 
had that primary merit of the scientific man 
which consists in fronting fact and truth 
confidently and without reserve, in declin- 
ing anxiety about any immediate inconsis- 
tencies which appear during research and 
change, and in refusing to accept or approve 
as known anything which is not known. 
" The moment you putty and plaster your 
expressions to make them hang together," he 
said to a young friend, "you have begun 



44 The Influence of Emerson 

a weakening process. Take it for granted 
the truths will harmonize ; and, as for the 
falsities and mistakes, they will speedily die 
of themselves." " I do not wish," he said 
to Frederika Bremer, "that people should 
pretend to know or to believe more than 
they really do know and believe." Apply- 
ing this to the discussion of immortality, — 
" we carry the pledges of this in our own 
breast," — he maintained that "we cannot 
say in what form or in what manner our 
existence will be continued." " He is faith- 
ful," comments Miss Bremer, " to the law 
in his own breast, and speaks out the truth 
which he inwardly recognizes. He does 
right. By this means he will prepare the 
way for a more true comprehension of re- 
ligion and of life." 

Emerson remarks upon "that wonderful 
congruity which subsists between man and 
the world — of which he is the lord, not be- 
cause he is the most subtile inhabitant, but 
because he is its head and heart, and finds 
something of himself in every great and 
small thing." This view, thus clear and 
explicit at the very beginning, in the pages 



The Philosophy of Emerson 45 

of " Nature," becomes ever more pro- 
nounced and prominent in his maturer 
thought. Half a dozen years later he says : 
" We can point nowhere to anything final, 
but tendency appears on all hands ; planet, 
system, constellation, total nature is grow- 
ing like a field of maize in July, is be- 
coming somewhat else. The embryo does 
not more strive to be man than yonder burr 
of light we call a nebula tends to be a 
ring, a comet, a globe, and a parent of new 
suns." This process of evolution, he says, 
" publishes itself in creatures, reaching from 
particles to spicula, through transformation 
on transformation, to the highest symme- 
tries, arriving at consummate results with- 
out a shock or a leap. . . . How far off is 
the trilobite, how far the quadruped ! How 
inconceivably remote is man ! All duly 
arrive, and then race after race of men. It 
is a long way from granite to oyster ; farther 
yet to Plato, and the preaching of the im- 
mortality of the soul. Yet all must come, 
as surely as the first atom has two sides." 
This, note, twenty years before men heard 
of Darwinism. "In ignorant ages," says 



46 The Influence of Emerson 

Emerson, "it was common to vaunt the 
human superiority by underrating the in- 
stinct of other animals. Better discern- 
ment finds that the only difference is of 
less and more. ,, Again, " 'Tis a long scale 
from the gorilla to the gentleman, — from 
the gorilla to Plato, Newton, Shakespeare, 
— to the sanctities of religion, to the re- 
finements of legislation, the summits of 
science, art, and poetry. The beginnings 
are slow and infirm, but 'tis an always ac- 
celerated march. " 

Passages of this sort could of course be 
multiplied indefinitely. The. reference in 
" Bacchus " to the ascent of life from form 
to form still remains incomparable, as Mr. 
Stedman has observed, for terseness and 
poetic illumination : — 

" I, drinking this, 
Shall hear far Chaos talk with me ; 
Kings unborn shall walk with me ; 
And the poor grass shall plot and plan 
What it will do when it is man." 

Lines in " Woodnotes" put the same 
in different phrase. Perhaps the most defi- 



The Philosophy of Emerson 47 

nite and sufficient statement of the doctrine 
by Emerson is that in the second essay on 
Plato. " Modern science," he said here, — 
this was ten years before Darwin, — cc by the 
extent of its generalizations has learned to 
indemnify the student of man for the de- 
fects of individuals, by tracing growth and 
ascent in races, and, by the simple expedi- 
ent of lighting up the vast background, 
generates a feeling of complacency and hope. 
The human being has the saurian and the 
plant in his rear. His arts and sciences, 
the easy issue of his brain, look glorious 
when prospectively beheld from the distant 
brain of ox, crocodile, and fish. It seems 
as if nature, in regarding the geologic night 
behind her, when, in five or six millen- 
niums, she has turned out five or six men, 
as Homer, Phidias, Menu, and Columbus, 
was nowise discontented with the result. 
These samples attested the virtue of the 
tree. These were a clear amelioration of 
trilobite and saurus, and a good basis for 
further proceeding. With this artist, time 
and space are cheap, and she is insensible 
to what you say of tedious preparation. 



48 The Influence of Emerson 

She waited tranquilly the flowing periods 
of palaeontology for the hour to be struck 
when man should arrive." 

" It is a misconception," says John Morley, 
" to pretend that Emerson was a precursor 
of the Darwinian theory" ; and he emphasizes 
the special character of Darwin's scientific 
hypothesis. " Evolution, as a possible ex- 
planation of the ordering of the universe," 
he says, " is a great deal older than either 
Emerson or Darwin." None knew that 
better than Emerson himself; and before 
he was twenty years old he wrote of " the 
circumstance which almost invariably attends 
the promulgation of a philosophical theory, 
— that authors start up to prove its antiquity, 
and that it is the identical theory which 
Pythagoras, Plato, or Epicurus propounded 
before." The point of interest here is 
that Emerson spoke about evolution in 
entirely new phrase ; and it was no mere 
"good fortune" by which his strong propo- 
sitions harmonize with "the new and most 
memorable drift of science which set in by 
his side," as Mr. Morley clearly recognizes 
they do. It was the " fatal gift of penetra- 



The Philosophy of Emerson 49 

tion " which enabled him to see and to pro- 
claim early and in universals that which 
was in the air and which Darwin presently 
should avouch in particulars. 

If Idealism be a true philosophy, then it 
was but natural and regular that Emerson 
should see and say this betimes. If Dar- 
winism be a true theory of the origin of 
species and the descent of man, then this in- 
sight and conclusion bear notable witness to 
the primary virtue and validity of Emerson's 
method. Indeed, if we consider, upon what 
presupposition are this insight and conclu- 
sion, if they be true, so likely and so clear as 
upon his? 

"The possibility of interpretation," he 
says, " lies in the identity of the observer 
with the observed. Each material thing 
has its celestial side ; has its translation, 
through humanity, into the spiritual and nec- 
essary sphere." " The reason why man 
knows about them is that he is of them ; he 
has just come out of nature, or from being a 
part of that thing." " I announce the good 
of being interpenetrated by the mind that 
made nature ; this benefit, namely, that it 



50 The Influence of Emerson 

can understand nature, which it made and 
maketh. Nature is good, but intellect is 
better : as the law-giver is before the law- 
receiver." In religion it is the thought of 
what may best be named the humanity of 
God. With sympathy he quotes the word 
of George Fox, that, cc though he read of 
Christ and God, he knew them only from 
the like spirit in his own soul. ,, The 
human is the door to the divine. 

Intellect is the supernatural, the creator 
and the sap of nature. Intellect is the divine, 
it is the mind in man. " Man must look at 
nature with a supernatural eye," says Emer- 
son. " Every natural fact is an emanation. 
Not the cause, but an ever novel effect, 
nature descends always from above. The 
beauty of these fair objects is imparted into 
them from a metaphysical and eternal spring. 
In all animal and vegetable forms, no chem- 
istry, no mechanics, can account for the 
facts ; but a mysterious principle of life must 
be assumed, which not only inhabits the 
organ, but makes the organ." This is the 
metaphysics of evolution, its philosophy, 
with Emerson. 



The Philosophy of Emerson 51 

And what of man in nature, — what of the 
mind ? We are brought by this word to 
Emerson's point of view. Man is the pro- 
jection of God in the self-conscious. "The 
foundations of man," says Emerson, "are 
not in matter, but in spirit " ; and u the 
element of spirit is eternity." " Man pre- 
tends to give account of himself to himself, 
but at last what has he to recite but the fact 
that there is a Life not to be described 
or known otherwise than by possession ? 
What account can he give of his essence more 
than so it was to be ? The royal reason, the 
Grace of God, seems the only description of 
our multiform but ever identical fact." 

"A God-intoxicated man " is a term which 
might be applied to Emerson as justly as it 
was applied to Spinoza. It is an impress- 
ive account which Mr. Woodbury gives of 
the meditation and discussion up under the 
shadow of Greylock, in which Emerson, after 
a long pause, exclaimed, lifting his head, 
" God ? It is all God ! " — marvelling how 
any thinker contemplating the universe could 
hold otherwise. But he was not a pantheist, 
although Theodore Parker was quite wrong 



52 The Influence of Emerson 

in saying that " no man is farther from it." 
There is almost no great modern religious 
thinker in whom the pantheistic element is 
so large ; but he is always the theist, always 
thoughtful of the personality, the conscious- 
ness, and the response. His pages throb 
with multiplied expressions of it. Has any 
believer in the personality of God, well asks 
Whipple in one of his Emerson essays, 
ever hit upon a better definition than " Con- 
scious Law," in that inspired line in " Wood- 
notes," — " Conscious Law is King of kings ?" 
Indeed there is not in all of Emerson's 
pages a loftier, more poetic, or more philo- 
sophic expression of his conception of evolu- 
tion in its divine genesis and eternal energy 
than the page which ends with this great 
line. 

" I praise with wonder," he says, " this great 
reality, this Supreme Presence, which seems 
to drown all things in the deluge of its light. 
What man, seeing this, can lose it from 
his thoughts, or entertain a meaner subject? 
The entrance of this into his mind seems to 
be the birth of man. We cannot describe 
the natural history of the soul, but we know 



The Philosophy of Emerson S3 

that it is divine. I cannot tell if these won- 
derful qualities which house to-day in this 
mortal frame shall ever reassemble in equal 
activity in a similar frame, or whether they 
have before had a natural history like that 
of this body ; but this one thing I know, 
that these qualities did not now begin to ex- 
ist, cannot be sick with my sickness, nor 
buried in any grave ; but that they circulate 
through the Universe : before the world was, 
they were. Nothing can bar them out, or 
shut them in ; they penetrate the ocean and 
land, space and time, form and essence, 
and hold the key to universal nature. I 
draw from this faith courage and hope. All 
things are known to the soul. It is not to 
be surprised by any communication. Noth- 
ing can be greater than it." 

" Every scripture is to be interpreted by 
the same spirit which gave it forth," — this, 
observes Emerson, is the fundamental law 
of criticism. And is it not apparent that 
all man's efforts to interpret the universe are 
at once vain and inexplicable, unless it be 
that he himself is of the same spirit which 
gave forth the universe, and eternally gives 



54 The Influence of Emerson 

forth ? The fact that man " doth philoso- 
phize, and must/' must ever ask the ques- 
tions which have their answers in infinity, is 
the blazing evidence of his oneness with the 
Mind by which the worlds are and were 
created. 

And that which is implied by speculation 
is also vouched by freedom and the infinite 
transformation wrought by Will. "The 
world," says Emerson, "yields itself passive 
to the educated Will." " From the child's 
successive possession of his several senses up 
to the hour when he saith, c Thy will be 
done ! ' he is learning the secret, that he can 
reduce under his will, not only particular 
events, but great classes, nay, the whole 
series of events, and so conform all facts to 
his character." Fate is unpenetrated cause. 
The water drowns ship and sailor, like a 
grain of dust; but learn to swim, trim 
your bark, and the wave which drowned it 
will carry it. " Steam, till the other day, 
was the devil which we dreaded ; but 
Worcester, Watt, and Fulton bethought 
themselves that, where was power, was not 
devil, but was God. Could he lift pots and 



The Philosophy of Emerson $5 

roofs so handily, he was the workman they 
were in search of. The opinion of the mill- 
ion was the terror of the world ; and it was 
attempted to hold it down with a layer of 
soldiers, over that a layer of lords, and a 
king on the top. But the Fultons and Watts 
of politics, by satisfying the million, have 
made of this terror the most harmless and 
energetic form of a State." " Every solid in 
the universe is ready to become fluid on the 
approach of the mind ; and the power to 
flux it is the measure of the mind. . . . One 
after another, man's victorious thought 
comes up with and reduces all things, until 
the world becomes, at last, only a realized 
will — the double of the man." 

" Intellect annuls Fate," says Emerson. 
" So far as a man thinks, he is free." I 
find it difficult to understand, in spite of the 
unrelieved determinism that to-day domin- 
ates and charms so many moralists and phil- 
osophic men, how one can see this doctrine 
of freedom challenged without jealousy, so 
fundamental does it appear to the intellectual 
process and to the interpretation and the 
very fact of the moral life. The vehemence 



56 The Influence of Emerson 

of the denial of free will by Luther and Cal- 
vin and many great religious minds is in- 
deed known to us ; and the subtlety and 
energy of the theologians' arguments we rec- 
ognize and deeply feel. They would em- 
phasize Providence, they would humble 
themselves entirely, they would empty 
themselves of all claim to merit, and know 
themselves only as chosen instruments 
through which God works his purposes. 
But freedom makes all the reverence and 
humility and grace and sonship and disciple- 
ship greater, and not less. Indeed, if we 
will ponder, are these even possible save as 
our wills are ours to make them God's ? I 
lately read a paper by a thoughtful man, in 
opposition to the principle that the freedom 
of the will is the corner-stone of ethics, and 
marvelled at the argument, to which Grote 
and Voltaire and John Fiske were all made 
to contribute. " The free agent " was gro- 
tesquely defined, in the language of Grote, 
as " one who can neither feel himself account- 
able nor be rendered accountable." " If the 
volition of agents be not influenced by 
motives, ,, it was said, — and who of us would 



The Philosophy of Emerson 57 

dream of denying so trivial a truism ? — " the 
whole machinery of law becomes unavailing, 
and punishment a purposeless infliction of 
pain." " If, when a robber is executed," so 
Voltaire was cited here, " his accomplice, who 
sees him suffer, has the liberty of not being 
frightened at the punishment, he will go 
from the foot of the scaffold to assassinate 
on the high-road ; if, struck with horror, he 
experiences an insurmountable terror, the 
punishment of his companion will become 
useful to him, and moreover prove to so- 
ciety that his will is not free." " Substitute 
for the unmeaning phrase, c freedom of the 
will/ " Mr. Fiske was quoted as saying, 
"the accurate phrase, c lawlessness of vo- 
lition/ and the theory already looks less 
plausible." " To write history," so Mr. 
Fiske was also quoted, " on any method fur- 
nished by the free-will doctrine would be 
utterly impossible." Surely, one could but 
say, Mr. Fiske could never have said this, 
save in his apprentice period. The expres- 
sion does occur in his " Cosmic Philosophy." 
But the unfortunate word gives no adequate 
idea of the purpose of the chapter, which is 



58 The Influence of Emerson 

to show the lawful power of motives. To 
whoever is inclined to look upon the reason- 
ing of Buckle as "equally legitimate and 
conclusive with that of Darwin," another 
contention of the critic, Mr. Fiske's own 
essay upon Buckle's fallacies may be com- 
mended ; and, surely, the history of America, 
which Mr. Fiske has done so much to illu- 
minate, can be based on no other doctrine 
than that of freedom. " Does the reading 
of history make us fatalists ? " says Emer- 
son. "What courage does not the opposite 
opinion show ! A little whim of will to be 
free gallantly contending against the universe 
of chemistry." 

" Substitute the accurate term lawlessness 
for freedom, and the theory already looks 
less plausible ! " Substitute lawlessness for 
freedom I Substitute Preston Brooks for 
Charles Sumner, substitute Alcibiades for 
Plato, and Judas for Saint John ! The con- 
fusion is a monstrous one. Is the lawless 
State the free State, — or the State where 
law is perfect and supreme? Who is the 
free citizen ? Is it a Lincoln or a Glad- 
stone, whose speech on each month's prob- 



The Philosophy of Emerson $9 

lem we confidently prophesy, by knowledge 
of the self-determined law of his mind, — or 
is it the Jingo of the music-hall, whose 
whim next week or the week after is quite 
incalculable ? Is it the obedient citizen, or 
the capricious and he who does not feel 
himself accountable ? As most of us under- 
stand it, this is he who finds himself in 
jail. 

Voltaire's identification of freedom with 
caprice, with insulation from influences, from 
motives and causality is a trivial thinking. 
Carlyle's judgment, that " there is not one 
great thought in all Voltaire's six and thirty 
quartos," was a judgment too severe ; but 
few will not own that he was "shallow" 
upon occasion, when they find him ad- 
ducing the fact that the sight of a hanging 
frightens a would-be murderer as a proof 
that the will is not free ! This line of 
thought — and it is common, indeed — pro- 
ceeds upon failure to analyze and define 
motive. Stocks and stones have no motives, 
and beasts and idiots next to none. Mo- 
tives multiply, grow definite, and grow 
imperative precisely as freedom grows ; and 



60 The Influence of Emerson 

the completer the freedom, the greater the 
contribution of the mind to its own motive. 
My motive is not apart from me : it is of 
me. I share in the creation of my motive, 
and this more and more with the evolution 
of my freedom. " Will, pure and perceiv- 
ing," says Emerson, " is not wilfulness. 
When a man, through stubborness, insists 
to do this or that, something absurd or 
whimsical, only because he will, he is weak ; 
he blows with his lips against the tempest." 
"If we thought men were free in the sense 
that in a single exception one fantastical 
will could prevail over the law of things, 
it were all one as if a child's hand could pull 
down the sun." " Let us build altars," he 
said, "to the Beautiful Necessity, which 
rudely or softly educates man to the percep- 
tion that there are no contingencies — that 
Law rules throughout existence." " If we 
give it the high sense in which the poets use 
it, even thought itself is not above Fate : 
that, too, must act according to eternal laws, 
and all that is wilful and fantastic in it is in 
opposition to its fundamental essence." 
Man may choose as he will, but he chooses 



The Philosophy of Emerson 61 

the wrong at his peril, his error or his sin 
in no wise earning deference from the moral 
nature of things ; and the problem set to 
man is to gladly will the universal, not to 
do somehow that which gravitation and the 
Ought command, — that he must do some- 
how, or be ground up, — but to do it volun- 
tarily, in the perceiving of its infallible ex- 
cellence and oneness with the deep base of 
the life. " Thank God," said Lessing, — 
he who said, in its place, that deep correla- 
tive word, " No man must must," — " that 
I must, must do the right." Herein only 
is freedom, — in obedience, in harmony with 
right. " The law of liberty," says Saint Paul. 
" Our wills are ours," says Tennyson, in his 
line, cc to make them thine." " The last 
lesson in life," says Emerson, in " Worship," 
using almost Spinoza's word, " is a vol- 
untary obedience, a necessitated freedom." 
" Morals," he says, "is the direction of the 
will on universal ends." But " morals im- 
plies freedom and will. The will constitutes 
the man." 

Mr. Cabot states Emerson's position in 
these words : " When man submits his will 



62 The Influence of Emerson 

to the Divine inspiration, he becomes a 
creator in the finite. If he is disobedient, 
if he would be something in himself, he finds 
all things hostile and incomprehensible." I 
quote this passage especially because it is 
one which an accomplished English critic, 
Mr. John M. Robertson, in an acute and 
valuable essay upon Emerson, marred by 
some curious complacencies about theism 
and atheism, singles out as the acme of in- 
consistency. He accepts it as truly repre- 
senting Emerson, but exclaims, " How in 
the name of reason can a human phenome- 
non be disobedient to the Universal Will ? " 
The question itself ignores the central and 
fundamental fact in Emerson's conception of 
man. Man is not a phenomenon ; and, if 
we must choose between calling the mind 
primarily intellect or will, we must say 
will. " The free-will or Godhead of men " 
Emerson speaks of. A phenomenon can 
be neither dutiful nor undutiful ; and the 
obedience of a machine does not constitute 
morality, but only the obedience of will, and 
that precisely because it can decline obedi- 
ence. Morals implies freedom, Emerson 



The Philosophy of Emerson 63 

says, as the immediate consciousness and 
common sense of men have said from the 
beginning, and the profoundest philosophy 
from Plato and Aristotle on to Emerson. 
We need no Kant to prove it by formulas 
of metaphysics. What else mean the words 
responsible, blame, retribution, indignation ? 
Why else this difference in kind between 
my feeling toward this stinging viper and 
that toward this selfish coward or false 
friend? Aristotle's simple old argument, 
in his " Ethics," for the free will and con- 
sequent responsibility of man, by appeal 
first to our own consciousness, and sec- 
ondly to the fact that in society we treat 
each other as free agents, and must do 
it, whatever our theory, has never been 
laid nor transcended yet, and is not likely 
to be in a hurry. But I know of no pro- 
founder word upon this old knot of freedom 
and necessity than that of Emerson, in the 
essay on " Fate." I think of no word so 
profound as this, no metaphysic of ethics so 
great, — a system of ethics it is in posse, — 
save, in somewhat, that of Kant's great 
Kritik. A complete survey of Emerson's 



64 The Influence of Emerson 

philosophy must give a cardinal place to 
his ethics. I do not here develop at length 
the ethical side, because I have done it 
elsewhere.* I know of no other thinker who 
so luminously points out the way to the 
solution of the sundry antinomies, their 
reconciliation in a higher synthesis, as Emer- 
son. Freedom and necessity, unity and 
personality, individualism and common- 
wealth, transcendence and immanence, — as 
we come into " intimater intimacy " with the 
mind of Emerson, the old puzzles puzzle 
less and less, and we learn to verify and 
chart what he discovers and. declares. No- 
where is the reconciling synthesis more im- 
pressive or more useful, more necessary for 
these times, than in the field of ethics. The 
reconciliation is between the evolution of 
institutions and the categorical imperative, 
between, if we please, Herbert Spencer and 
Immanuel Kant. Emerson fronts a kinder 
and more co-operant universe than Kant. 
Morals, he said while yet a mere boy, and 
in ever firmer accent with the years, consti- 

* Address upon "Emerson's Ethics," published in the volume 
of Concord Lectures upon "The Genius and Character of Emerson.'* 



The Philosophy of Emerson 65 

tutes the " health integrity " of the universe ; 
and morals is the health of the soul, the 
activity befitting and commanding its nature. 
The moral development of man is his proc- 
ess, prompted by inspiration and impera- 
tive from within and from without, toward 
realization and obedience of the central law 
of his own being, in which obedience he 
finds freedom and efficiency and himself. 
The " data of ethics " and sundry observa- 
tions of most of the moral philosophers of 
evolution would be to the mind of Emer- 
son mere notes of results and processes, with 
the purpose and dynamics still left to be 
explained. The first principles of the Kant- 
ian ethics, the three cardinal doctrines of 
the Kritik of Practical Reason, never received 
such powerful summary statement as in 
Emerson's famous lines : — 

" So nigh is grandeur to our dust, 
So near is God to man, 
When Duty whispers low, Tbou must, 
The youth replies, / can" 

Here is the categorical imperative ; and 
here the assurance, Thou canst, because 



66 The Influence of Emerson 

thou shalty — because thou oughtest. Obligation 
measures and defines capacity and freedom ; 
and the absoluteness of the obligation il- 
lumines and defines the two great presup- 
positions, — the grandeur of the eternal nat- 
ure thus commanded, and the completeness 
of the divine support and guarantee. 

Nature is no sentimentalist to Emerson. 
He believes in no "pistareen Providence, 
which, whenever the good man wants a 
dinner, makes that somebody shall knock at 
his door and leave a half-dollar." It is of 
no use, he says, to "dress up that terrific 
benefactor in the clean shirt and white neck- 
cloth of a student in divinity." The world 
" will not mind drowning a man or woman." 
Nor is there any underrating of external 
influence or circumstance by Emerson. 
" Every spirit makes its house," he says ; 
" but afterwards the house confines the 
spirit." " How shall a man escape from 
his ancestors ? " "At the corner of the 
street you read the possibility of each pas- 
senger, in the facial angle." " A crudity in 
the blood will appear in the argument; a 
hump in the shoulder will appear in the 



The Philosophy of Emerson 67 

speech and handiwork." You cannot make 
a poet of " that little fatty face, pig-eye, and 
squat form." " The election often goes, 
probably, by avoirdupois weight — and it 
might be speedier to take the parties to the 
hay-scales than to the ballot-box." Circum- 
stance, nature, the thick skull, is half. 
" The book of Nature is the book of Fate." 
Whatever limits us we call Fate ; and lim- 
itation runs through entire nature. Fate 
is organization tyrannizing over character. 
" But if Fate is so prevailing, man also," 
says Emerson, cc is part of it, and can con- 
front fate with fate. History is the action 
and reaction of these two — Nature and 
Thought. Man cannot blink the free will. 
To hazard the contradiction, freedom is 
necessary. If you please to plant yourself 
on the side of Fate, and say Fate is all ; 
then we say, a part of Fate is the freedom 
of man. Intellect annuls Fate. So far as a 
man thinks, he is free. He who sees 
through the design presides over it, and 
must will that which must be. If the wall 
remain adamant, it accuses the want of 
thought. The one serious and formidable 



68 The Influence of Emerson 

thing in nature is a will." " 'Tis written on 
the gate of heaven," he quotes from Persian 
Hafiz, " c Woe unto him who suffers him- 
self to be betrayed by Fate ! ' " 

" It is wholesome to man to look not at 
Fate," Emerson says, " but the other way : 
the practical view is the other." This takes 
us back to that place in " Nature " where he 
declared the advantage of the ideal theory 
to be that it presents the world in precisely 
that view which is most desirable to the 
mind, the view approved alike by philoso- 
phy and by virtue. And it indicates the 
primary principle of his method of reform, 
whether dealing with appetite or crime. We 
have seen how fully he recognizes the power 
of environment and circumstance. Envi- 
ronment itself is the creation of thought, 
and it is ultimately and essentially in the 
control of thought. It is right and signally 
important that we should direct our efforts 
to the amelioration of circumstance, that so 
those results which conform to the results 
of virtue may be facilitated and made more 
constant. Indeed, this fact, that the melior- 
ation of circumstance is also in man's power 



The Philosophy of Emerson 69 

and is his prescribed task, bears the same 
witness to his freedom as his triumph over 
circumstance. It is analogous to the crea- 
tion of motive, if, indeed, it be not a part of 
that process. It is the triumph over circum- 
stance, — only in broader circle, and vica- 
rious in somewhat. But this triumph over 
circumstance in every circle is the command 
of virtue, and the teaching of its necessity 
and possibility is the cardinal ethical truth 
of the ideal theory. Above and below and 
within those seven ancestors wrapped up in 
thy skin — however we quibble and hedge, 
this is the fatal, inescapable rescript alike of 
common sense and high philosophy — is 
that new thing which thou art ; and this, 
and not chiefly those, is responsible for thy 
depravity and fall. Thou art the doer of 
this wrong, and not thy father rather ; and 
deviltry is not all one with dyspepsia. It 
were not possible for Emerson to write Car- 
lyle's essay on the Model Prison ; but in 
his vocabulary also sinner and scoundrel and 
scamp were not yet obsolete words nor syno- 
nyms of invalid. 

The doctrine of evolution, the perception 



70 The Influence of Emerson 

of the law of evolution working on and up- 
ward through all nature and through human 
society, is one of the most fertilizing and in- 
spiring facts in the whole history of science. 
A doctrine apprehended and vaguely pro- 
pounded at various times in the long history 
of thought, it is peculiarly and definitely a 
doctrine of our own time, and its distinctive 
scientific doctrine. It was its misfortune 
that it came into prominence at a time when 
in England and Germany there prevailed a 
poor, mechanical philosophy, and that with 
this it became identified. I have spoken 
elsewhere of the mischief wrought by this 
unhappy alliance to the cause of ethics and 
religion. The opposition of the churches 
and religious men to the new truth, by 
which in the fierce conflict they were routed 
again and again, and could not fail to be 
conscious of the defeats, had its deep war- 
rant; for the new truth was half-truth, and 
the half which was lacking was the half 
which they held with their falsehood, and 
the most necessary half. In America it was 
not until the publication of Mr. Fiske's 
little treatise upon " The Destiny of Man " 



The Philosophy of Emerson 71 

— first read, it is interesting to remember, 
at the Concord School of Philosophy, which 
was so dear to Emerson, and of which he 
may be said to have been the inspirer — 
that the doctrine was stated in a form which 
satisfied the imperative religious and poet- 
ical demands of men, and was subsumed 
under a worthy and measurably satisfying 
philosophy. Religion and poetry to-day 
have no quarrel with the doctrine of evolu- 
tion. In history, economics and politics the 
reconciliation is more dilatory; and it is 
questionable whether it is not in these fields 
that the mischief has been greatest. The 
prostitution of political ideals which America 
and England witnessed as the century closed 
would never have been possible but for the 
subtle and pervasive poisoning of the popu- 
lar consciousness by partial and false doc- 
trines of the principle and character of evo- 
lution. Catch-words about "survival of 
the fittest," and notions that the fittest are 
the strongest and that science had put its 
imprimatur upon the history of evolution as 
a history of remorseless competition and 
chartered dominion by the " select," — these 



72 The Influence of Emerson 

have done, and will contine to do, their fatal 
work. But this is not the true philosophy 
of evolution. That philosophy compre- 
hends altruism also, and gives its scientific 
exhibition the larger place, even as it holds 
the larger and ever-increasing place in life. 
Severe, indeed, has the long conflict been, 
if ever less savage ; and the trail of blood is 
over the forest and over the nations. Who 
has phrased this side of it more strongly 
than Emerson in his lines in " The World- 
Soul " ? But through all creation and from 
remotest beginnings, the sacrifice of strong 
to weak, the mother's love, the mutual aid, 
the social impulse have been along with the 
struggle and the selfishness, have ever kept 
the superior influence, thus alone making 
life and evolution possible, and containing 
the sure potency and promise of fruition in 
the State whose ethics shall be those of 
hearth and home, and in the family of 
nations, the federation of the world. 

It is the idealists, and they alone, who 
have been able so to interpret evolution in 
its bearings upon politics and human history. 
A hundred years before John Fiske, at the 



The Philosophy of Emerson 73 

Concord School of Philosophy, gave to the 
doctrine of evolution a statement satisfying 
to religion, Immanuel Kant, in his great 
essay on " The Natural Principle of Political 
Order,' ' surveyed the movement of nature 
and of human history, seeing the whole as 
a ceaseless process of beneficent evolution, 
and seeking to determine its final end. Said 
Kant: "All the capacities implanted in a 
creature by nature are destined to unfold 
themselves, completely and conformably to 
their end, in the course of time. ... In man, 
as the only rational creature on earth, those 
natural capacities which are directed toward 
the use of his reason could be completely 
developed only in the species, and not in the 
individual. . . . The means which nature 
employs to bring about the development of 
all the capacities implanted in men is their 
mutual antagonism in society ; but only so 
far as this antagonism becomes at length the 
cause of an order among them that is regu- 
lated by law. . . . The history of the human 
race, viewed as a whole, may be regarded as 
the realization of a hidden plan of nature to 
bring about a perfect political constitution, 



74 The Influence of Emerson 

as the only state in which all the capacities 
implanted by her in mankind can be fully 
developed." " The idea of human history," 
he adds, " viewed as founded upon the as- 
sumption of a universal plan in nature, gives 
us a new ground of hope, opening up to us 
a consoling view of the future, in which the 
human race appears in the far distance as 
having worked itself up to a condition in 
which all the germs implanted in it by nature 
will be fully developed and its destiny here 
on earth fulfilled. Such a justification of 
nature — or rather, let us say, of Providence 
— is no insignificant motive for choosing a 
particular point of view in contemplating the 
course of the world. For what avails it to 
magnify the glory and wisdom of the crea- 
tion in the irrational domain of nature, and 
to recommend it to devout contemplation, if 
that part of the great display of the supreme 
wisdom which presents the end of it all in 
the history of the human race is to be viewed 
as only furnishing perpetual objections to 
that glory and wisdom ? " 

Our New World Transcendentalist would 
put the same question ; as he, too, saw and 



The Philosophy of Emerson 75 

said that the fact that a theory meets the 
mind's high demands, serves the positive 
ends, and makes things fall into order in- 
stead of into discord is a persuasive attesta- 
tion of its virtue and its truth. He de- 
scribed in a moment and at the beginning the 
whole course from " The Origin of Species " 
to " The Destiny of Man " and beyond. 
A dozen years after Darwin startled the 
theologians he would have used the same 
serene words which he used a dozen years 
before it or would have used a dozen years 
before that : " We have a better opinion of 
the economy of nature than to fear that 
those varying phases which humanity pre- 
sents ever leave out any of the grand springs 
of human action. Mankind for the moment 
seem to be in search of a religion. The 
Jewish cultus is declining : the Divine or, as 
some will say, the truly Human hovers, 
now seen, now unseen, before us." The 
period was " propitious to those who believe 
that man need not fear the want of re- 
ligion, because they know his religious con- 
stitution, — that he must rest on the moral 
and religious sentiments, as the motion of 



76 The Influence of Emerson 

bodies rests on geometry. In the rapid de- 
cay of what was called religion, timid and 
unthinking people fancy a decay of the hope 
of man. But the moral and religious senti- 
ments meet us everywhere, alike in markets 
as in churches. . . . The conscience of man 
is regenerated as is the atmosphere, so that 
society cannot be debauched. The health 
which we call Virtue is an equipoise which 
easily redresses itself, and resembles those 
rocking-stones which a child's finger can 
move, and a weight of many hundred tons 
cannot overthrow. ,, It is to religion pecu- 
liarly that he applies the law of evolution, 
and with results which do not bring dismay, 
but joy and re-enforcement. * c The Author 
of Nature has not left himself without a 
witness in any sane mind," was the first 
article of that great creed which he recited 
from the platform of the Free Religious As- 
sociation in 1869 ; and two years before that, 
he said in the same place, contrasting that 
strong consciousness with the "mortifying 
puerilities " which abound in religious his- 
tory and with which men have propped 
their feeble faith, "As soon as every man 



The Philosophy of Emerson 77 

is apprised of the Divine presence within his 
own mind, — is apprised that the perfect law 
of duty corresponds with the laws of chemis- 
try, of vegetation, of astronomy, as face to 
face in a glass ; that the basis of duty, the 
order of society, the power of character, the 
wealth of culture, the perfection of taste, all 
draw their essence from this moral senti- 
ment, then we have a religion that exalts, 
that commands all the social and all the pri- 
vate action.' ' " There is a fear," he said else- 
where, "that pure truth, pure morals, will 
not make a religion for the affections. " This 
fear was foolish, because, as he saw well, 
biography and history and poetry ever wait 
on inspiration and in good time bring the 
ivy. " Whenever the sublimities of char- 
acter shall be incarnated in a man, we may 
rely that law and love and insatiable curios- 
ity will follow his steps." The history of all 
in the past which makes just appeal to rev- 
erence and devotion is secure, a permanent 
possession ; and new canonizations can only 
make us richer, and not poorer. No true 
divinity or saint can ever become less ; but 
no universal truth of God can ever be long 



78 The Influence of Emerson 

dependent, and it can never be contingent, 
upon any individual bearer or embodiment 
of it. " There was a time when Christianity- 
existed in one child ; but, if the child had 
been killed by Herod, would the element 
have been lost? God sends his message, if 
not by one, then quite as well by another. 
When the Master of the Universe has ends 
to fulfil, he impresses his will on the struct- 
ure of minds." There are those who think 
that but for Jesus the cardinal truths and 
influences of what we call, and properly call, 
Christianity would not be present among 
men. The rejection of this view, as con- 
cerns not only Christianity, but every great 
movement in history, in no way derogates 
from the praise or merit of the thinker or 
the doer who stands at the forefront of the 
movement, or from the charm and inspira- 
tion of the heroic and prophetic life. It 
simply affirms that universal truths of God 
and the supply of humanity's cardinal de- 
mands are superior to contingency. We 
find that the development of monotheism 
among the Greeks follows much the same 
course as its development among the He- 



The Philosophy of Emerson 79 

brews, the independent parallel lines having 
their origin and impulse in the common 
mind of man. We may not believe that, 
had there been no first Columbus, there 
would have been no second ; that, had there 
been no Kant, Fichte and Hegel would not 
somehow have spoken ; without Adams and 
Jefferson, no articulation of the demand for 
independence ; without Garrison and Lin- 
coln, no emancipation. None the less do 
we keep the saints' days, and celebrate the 
actual pioneers and heroes. Many currents 
converge in the great man and movement, 
and diverge from them. The currents are 
numerous and calculable almost in ratio of 
the greatness ; and the great soul most rev- 
erently recognizes its mediatorship and in- 
spiration, its obligations to the past and 
their commandment for fulfilment. Emer- 
son himself speaks of the seven or eight 
ancestors rolled up in each other's skin, 
whom a man feels and represents, and who 
contribute their variety of notes to that new 
piece of music which his life is ; and as of 
his personal inheritance, so he would have 
spoken of the intellectual and spiritual, 



80 The Influence of Emerson 

while recognizing in wonder and awe that 
original and extra element, in no way to be 
accounted for but by " the royal reason." 
Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Emerson, 
with all reverence for the direct inspiration 
of the gods, knows well and piously wit- 
nesses how much in him is his grandfather 
and his father, and how the compounding 
with his own nature of the influence of 
Apollonius and Rusticus and Maximus was 
what had given him moral dignity, freedom 
from superstition, love of philosophy, and 
steadiness of purpose. And so Jesus, most 
synthetic, inspiring and divine among the 
sons of men, would warn us, when intellect- 
ual praise is intemperate and distorted, to 
bethink us of Hosea and Isaiah, of Plato 
and Zeno and Philo, to remember that the 
mind of his time was surcharged with the 
elements precipitated in him with such revo- 
lutionary power and charm, and not to doubt 
that even without him God would somehow 
have found his Pauls and Johns, his Augus- 
tines and Bernards, his Calvins and Chan- 
nings, to bear the message of divine love 
and incarnation to the human race 



The Philosophy of Emerson 81 

With the churches of his time, Emerson 
came into opposition ; but the ground of 
his opposition concerned what was accidental 
and extrinsic. " I object to the claim of 
miraculous dispensation, — certainly not to 
the doctrine of Christianity. " The miracu- 
lous claim, to his mind, " impaired the sound- 
ness of him who makes it ; ... it is contrary 
to that law of nature which all wise men 
recognize, never to require a larger cause 
than is necessary to the effect." It con- 
founded Christianity with " the fables of 
every popular religion." We know divine 
things only by the like spirit in ourselves, 
and are repelled by any effort to enforce 
acceptance of them by wonders or anything 
extraneous or official instead of by pure 
sympathy. The attempt to elevate Christ 
out of humanity "takes his teachings out 
of logic and out of nature," and distrust of 
the story prompts distrust of the doctrine. 

Emerson's opposition to the miraculous 
theory was precisely that of Kant, who in 
his " Religion of Reason " exhibited so con- 
vincingly that it is favorable neither to ethics 
nor to faith. Churches have based belief in 



82 The Influence of Emerson 

the immortality of the soul upon Christ's 
resurrection, pronouncing the faith vain 
without this. But the physical resurrection 
of a supernatural Christ no more gives as- 
surance of the resurrection of the common 
man than the fact that Christ raises Lazarus 
from the dead proves that Matthew and 
Mark could do it, or you and I. So the 
perfect life of a being whose nature tran- 
scends ours has not the incitement nor im- 
perative for us of the less perfect life of one 
who, howsoever transcending us in spiritual 
insight and moral worth, is still of the same 
nature, having the same essential roots in 
the Divine. The historical justification of 
the miraculous theory is indeed evident and 
strong. By such particularization the gen- 
eral mind is leavened and lifted to the per- 
ception of the wonder of the world and the 
spirituality of man. Until this perception 
becomes reliable and influential in its uni- 
versal application, the particular object-les- 
son will continue to be distorted. The over- 
emphasis is nature's way out of no em- 
phasis. It is easy to say that men should 
cease speaking of sacred and profane his- 



The Philosophy of Emerson 83 

tory ; but it is also easy and common for 
men to cease the distinction by making all 
history profane. Until we learn to see that 
all is sacred, that the sacred is perennial, and 
that John Calvin and John Milton and the 
" Mayflower" men are also Bible men, so long 
the " Jewish cultus " or another must go on, 
and Josias, Obadias, and the siege of Ai 
weary the educated man by their exaggerated 
prominence. The miracle will not " fade 
out of history " till " faith and wonder and 
the primal earth " are not alone " born into 
the world with every child," but are of all men 
known to be. The slow ages, keeping their 
many steeds abreast, attend efficiently to the 
conservations. We do not need, any of us, 
to connive at the illusions and delays, al- 
though some of the anxious faithless seem to 
think it. If the Daughters of Time can be at 
once i c hypocritic " and innocent, none of us 
can be : we cannot be naive by calculation. 
The highest skill for each of us is simple 
truth, and we may safely leave it to the 
divinities to weave our thread rightly into 
the great pattern. This was the confidence 
of Emerson. The highest churchman and 



84 The Influence of Emerson 

the stoutest champion of infallibility are not 
equally serene, equally neighborly with the 
past and its oracles, or equally reposeful in 
the future. Nowhere are the religious post- 
ulates so firm, yet nowhere is such concord 
with the scientific process. He has no need 
to interpose checks or diversions. New 
Orthodoxies rise with their " Christo-cen- 
tric " theories, thinking to eat their cake and 
keep it too, putting slights on miracle at 
the same time that they put it to use. 
They have never learned to define Man, nor 
seen what the definition involves. They 
think of men; and, even as concerns sin it- 
self, they have not taken in the full phi- 
losophy of the parable of the prodigal son. 
Emerson sees clearly the fatuity of all this 
thinking. It will go on until men know 
their real nature as it is, and as Christ knew 
it ; so long especially as the apprehension 
and virtue of the soul's divinity are menaced 
and shadowed by "the puppyism " — it was 
the most scornful word to which Emerson 
was ever moved — " of a pretension of look- 
ing down on the head of all human culture, 
setting up against Jesus Christ every little 



The Philosophy of Emerson 85 

self magnified." " It behooves the lover 
of God to love that lover of God," he 
said with his great emphasis when he sus- 
pected popular reaction from exaggeration 
to profaneness ; and as against any vulgar 
definitions he would have been patient with 
the age of superstition till the age of ra- 
tional reverence came. The religious mind 
demands the objective ; and mankind does 
well to glorify attainment while on its way 
to the sanctity of a true understanding of 
its own essence and potentiality. But Em- 
erson well knew that the emphatic and 
peculiar features of the Church's ancient 
system, its bibliology, cosmology, penol- 
ogy, eschatology and fellow ologies, its 
Christology with the rest, were doomed, 
the moment it was seen that Eden, in the 
words of his disciple in her beautiful hymn, 

11 Is not ancient story told, 
But a glowing prophecy." 

Primeval history is the record of the rise of 
man, not of his fall. The chasm of which 
humanity has been so painfully sensible 
and sought so strenuously to give account 



86 The Influence of Emerson 

is between the creative archetypal Idea and 
the first step of the evolutionary process 
whose last step shall be the actualization 
of the Idea in the Divine Commonwealth. 
The first Eden is of heaven, heavenly, the 
harrying divine thought implanted in the 
mind of man at the beginning, the haunting 
hint of his own definition ; the last Eden is 
the Republic of God. Emerson saw the 
path, the motive, the original and end ; and 
he saw them in a way which made his 
philosophy of religion harmonious with the 
science of his time, and made him the true 
friend and aider of all critical men who, in 
a critical age, would live in the spirit. 

All evolution was subsumed by him under 
an adequate philosophy. Behind and through 
the process he saw the Idea, — which so 
many men of science in this time have not 
seen, and, not seeing, have wrought their 
mischief. Already as a boy, in one of his 
college essays,* he wrote what might well 

*His Bowdoin essay on " The Present State of Ethical Philoso- 
phy," in 1 82 1, for which he received a second prize. He received 
the first Bowdoin prize the previous year for an essay on "The Char- 
aracter of Socrates " ; but this essay is inferior to the other. The two 
have been published together with an introduction by Rev. Edward 
Everett Hale. 



The Philosophy of Emerson 87 

have served Kropotkin as a motto for the 
title-page of his u Mutual Aid as a Factor in 
Evolution ° : " The opinion that nature tends 
to savageness is not true." The impulses to 
social intercourse he saw were aboriginal ; 
and more selective and determining than 
fierceness was parental affection, dictating ac- 
tions of "wise and profound calculation." 
The word of his youth was the word of his 
age. The law after which the Universe was 
made he pronounced to be that which the 
moral sentiment speaks to every man ; and 
it was with the assertion of " parity, identity 
of design, through Nature," that he declared 
that we find " benefit to be the uniform aim : 
that there is a force always at work to make 
the best better and the worst good." This 
is Emerson's rationale of the dynamics and 
the teleology of evolution ; and there is no 
other satisfying or sane philosophy. 

Amidst many rash and mischievous " phi- 
losophies of evolution," it is wholesome to 
recur to these first principles, — profitable 
and very necessary to consider seriously what 
is first and what circumferential second. No 
man in this time has approached the prob- 



88 The Influence of Emerson 

lem of the world and the soul with mind so 
capacious and so veracious as our own great 
thinker; none has spoken a word so pro- 
portionate, so rational, and so commanding. 
The American, at least, has not excuse who, 
possessed of Emerson's inspired and sacred 
page, permits his insight to truckle to tra- 
dition, hangs up his logic on psychology, 
and chokes intellect and freedom in mechan- 
ism, lawlessness, and fate. 



II 

Emerson and Theodore Parker 



EMERSON AND THEODORE 
PARKER 

In 1838 the daguerreotype was invented. 
I wish that the first sensitive plate, perfected 
and tenacious, could have been uncovered, 
not in Westminster Abbey, where on a 
midsummer day in that year 1838 Victoria 
was crowned queen, — the gewgaws conse- 
crated by traditions of the Conqueror and 
Richard Lionheart and Harry Tudor and 
the real kings brushed up once more by the 
rather ghostly bishops who wore the robes 
of Stephen Langton and Joseph Butler, and 
a galvanized crown blessed once more by a 
galvanized Church, — not there, but in the 
little chapel of the Divinity School of Har- 
vard University, where on another mid- 
summer day of that same year a little crowd 
of men and women was gathered, and an 
earnest man was speaking simply some 
simple, earnest words. We should all like 
a picture of that scene, I think ; for this man 



92 The Influence of Emerson 

was the real king, and this scene was more 
impressive than the other to him who sees 
deep. Ideas alone have royalty and divine 
right in this noon-time of the world ; and 
so we count this little gathering at Harvard 
the most important thing of that year 1838. 

The speaker was Ralph Waldo Emerson. 
The name did not mean much on the morn- 
ing of that day. The small world to which 
it was known at all knew it as the name of 
a young man who had left the pulpit of the 
Unitarian Church half a dozen years before, 
because he could not conscientiously join in 
the sacrament of the Lord's Supper; who 
had been to Europe since and hunted up 
Thomas Carlyle in the solitude of Craigen- 
puttock, and had just now published in 
Boston Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus. ,, He 
had written a little book of his own, too, — 
" Nature," — and had given lectures in Boston 
and the towns about, which had drawn to 
him the attention of the thoughtful people. 
He had given an oration at Harvard the 
year before the Divinity School Address, on 
" The American Scholar," which had so 
shocked the scholars who heard and read it 



Emerson and Theodore Parker 93 

into reality and consciousness of their own 
souls that Dr. Holmes pronounced it " our 
intellectual Declaration of Independence/' 
He had retired now from the rush and roar 
of Boston to the quiet of a Concord farm- 
house to spend his life. 

" Good-bye, proud world kl'm going home," 

he had said again to the fawning flattery and 
upstart wealth of the town and the insinceri- 
ties and old clothes of the Church. 

" When I am stretched beneath the pines, 
Where the evening star so holy shines, 
I laugh at the lore and the pride of man, 
At the sophist schools and the learned clan ; 
For what are they all, in their high conceit, 
When man in the bush with God may meet ? " 

He had been meeting with God in the 
bush, standing on the holy ground with the 
shoes off his feet ; and he was come now 
to tell the college and the Church what the 
voice had said. 

He spoke of the beauty of nature. He 
spoke of spiritual laws, of which all nature 
that we see is but the clothing and the 



94 The Influence of Emerson 

symbol. He spoke of the more overpower- 
ing beauty of the sentiment of virtue, which 
teaches us that we are "born to the per- 
fect.' ' " The laws of the soul execute them- 
selves," he said. " He who does a good 
deed is instantly ennobled ; he who does a 
mean deed is by the action itself contracted. 
If a man is at heart just, then in so far 
is he God. If a man deceive, he deceives 
himself. Thus is man made the Provi- 
dence to himself, dispensing good to his 
goodness and evil to his sin." This senti- 
ment, he said, lies at the foundation of 
society. Its absence is the presence of 
degradation. Let this primary faith depart, 
and the very words it spake become false 
and hurtful. The doctrine of inspiration 
lost or the oracle made second-hand, and 
the church falls, and the state, art, letters, 
and life. 

Such a time, said this new prophet, had 
come in the history of the American 
Church. Its prayers and dogmas were 
grown as fabulous as Dante's Inferno, 
wholly insulated from anything in the life 
and business of the people. Tradition, said 



Emerson and Theodore Parker 95 

he, characterizes the preaching of this 
country : it comes out of the memory, and 
not out of the soul. It is assumed that the 
age of inspiration is past, and that the Bible 
is closed. But it is the office of a true 
teacher to show us that God is, not was ; 
that he speaketh, not spake. The true 
Christianity, a faith like Christ's in the infini- 
tude of man, was lost. Jesus Christ, said 
Emerson, was true to what is in you and 
me. He saw that God incarnates himself 
in man, and evermore goes forth anew to 
take possession of his world. He said : 
" I am divine. Through me, God acts ; 
through me, speaks. Would you see God, 
see me ; or, see thee, when thou also thinkest 
as I now think." But the understanding 
caught this high chant from the poet's lips, 
and said in the next age, " This was 
Jehovah come down out of heaven." The 
idioms of his language usurped the place 
of his truth ; and churches are built, not 
on his principles, but on his tropes. The 
preachers do not see that they make 
Christ's gospel not glad, and degrade his 
life and dialogues by insulation and pecu- 



96 The Influence of Emerson 

liarity. Let them lie, as they befell, alive 
and warm and part of human life. To aim 
to convert a man by miracles is a profa- 
nation of the soul. That which shows God 
in me is what fortifies me. Dare to go 
alone. Dare to love God without mediator 
or veil. Thank God for all good men, 
but say, " I also am a man." Yourself a 
new-born bard of the Holy Ghost, cast 
conformity behind you, and acquaint men 
at first hand with God. 

This Harvard address of Emerson's 
marked an epoch. It was the first clear, 
complete, and uncompromising utterance of 
rational religion in America. It showed all 
men at once what the new faith was, and 
what it meant to do. It fell into the camp 
of the stiff and proper Unitarianism of Bos- 
ton and Cambridge like a thunderbolt. It 
was a touchstone. It compelled every man 
to define himself and speak out somehow or 
other ; and it divided the Church. " There 
are now two parties among the Unitarians, ,, 
wrote Parker. " One is for progress ; the 
other says, c Our strength is to stand still/ 
Dr. Channing is the real head of the first 



Emerson and Theodore Parker 97 

party ; the other has no head." Charming, 
who was less than almost anything else in 
the world a fC Channing Unitarian," stood 
by Emerson, — said, indeed, that he could 
discover no essential difference between 
Emerson's address and the sermon he him- 
self had preached at the dedication of the 
school. He found that he himself " could 
not draw a long breath in Boston." Soon 
after, indeed, he died. Had he lived ten 
years longer, with his great prestige and 
power and his ever steady movement for- 
ward, he would have saved the Unitarian 
Church in America half a century. 

But in the general Unitarian camp, " one 
shouted," said Parker, " ' The Philistines be 
upon us ! ' another, c We are all dead men ! ' 
while the majority called out, c Atheism ! ' : 
The dean of the Divinity School said, 
"That part of it which was not folly was 
downright atheism." Mr. Norton, the 
high priest of the Church in those days, 
opened his mouth and preached upon " The 
Latest Form of Infidelity." No miracles, 
he said, no religion : the miracles of Jesus 
are the only evidence of the truth of Chris- 



98 The Influence of Emerson 

tianity. Henry Ware told the young men 
that, if there appeared to them any contra- 
diction between the reason of man and the 
letter of the Bible, they "must follow the 
written word." " Reason," said another, 
"must be put down, or she will soon ask 
terrible questions." Harvard College, in 
the person of one who taught a "sound" 
philosophy there, had already pronounced 
Emerson's thoughts " fantastic and unreal " ; 
and Professor Felton soon found that they 
were " full of extravagance and overween- 
ing self-confidence, ancient errors disguised 
in misty rhetoric, and theories which would 
overturn society and resolve the world into 
chaos." Such being the voice of Harvard 
College and of the Unitarian Church, we 
can picture for ourselves the reception ac- 
corded the new prophet in other religious 
circles and by the world at large. 

But amid all this uproar there was one 
young man, not thirty years old yet, who 
had sat quietly through the address in the 
Harvard Chapel and, going home, had 
written : " It was the most inspiring strain 
I ever listened to, — so beautiful, so just, 



Emerson and Theodore Parker 99 

so true, and terribly sublime ! My soul is 
roused, and this week I shall write the long- 
meditated sermons on the state of the 
Church and the duties of these times." 
This young man had graduated at the 
Divinity School two years before, studying 
under Ware and Norton there, and was now 
settled over a little parish in West Roxbury. 
He was born in Lexington. His grand- 
father was the captain of the minute-men 
who gathered on Lexington Green on that 
morning of the 19th of April, 1775, and led 
in the first battle with British tyranny in 
the Revolution. The young man's name 
was Theodore Parker. 

Theodore Parker was already a suspected 
man, known among his fellows as a man of 
ideas ; and during the next three years he 
did much thinking. In May, 1841, at an 
ordination in South Boston, he sounded his 
full keynote, in a sermon on "The Tran- 
sient and Permanent in Christianity." He 
showed the evils of an appeal to any ex- 
ternal, prescriptive authority in matters of 
religion. He showed that there is no reason 
why moral and religious truths should rest 

LofC. 



ioo The Influence of Emerson 

for their support on the personal authority 
of their revealer any more than the truths 
of science on the authority of him who 
makes them known first or most clearly. 
" If it could be proved," he said, " that the 
Gospels were a fabrication and that Jesus of 
Nazareth never lived, Christianity would 
still stand firm and fear no evil. In an age 
of corruption, Jesus stood and looked up to 
God. There was nothing between him and 
the Father of all. And we never are Chris- 
tians as he was the Christ until we worship 
as Jesus did, with no mediator, with nothing 
between us and the Father of all." 

You remember the result of this. It 
seems almost incredible to-day, when Chan- 
ning's Baltimore sermon of 1 8 19, Emerson's 
Harvard address of 1838, and this very 
sermon of Parker's in 1841 are the three 
utterances popularly classed in the Unita- 
rian circle as the conspicuous landmarks 
of Unitarian thought and progress. The 
Church dropped him. "So far as the min- 
isters are concerned," he was compelled to 
say, " I am alone." But the blood of his 
Lexington grandfather was in him, and he 



Emerson and Theodore Parker 101 

said : " I will go about and preach and lecture 
in the city and glen, by the roadside and 
fieldside, and wherever men and women 
may be found. I will go eastward and west- 
ward and northward and southward, and 
make the land ring; and if this New 
England theology, that cramps the intellect 
and palsies the soul of us, does not come to 
the ground, then it shall be because it has 
more truth in it than I have ever found. 
What I have seen to be false I will proclaim 
a lie on the house-top ; and, fast as God re- 
veals truth, I will declare his word." And 
then, while almost every pulpit and every 
newspaper in Boston was vilifying him, 
while some of his clerical friends would not 
speak to him in the street and refused to 
take him by the hand, — let us never forget 
the noble exceptions, let us remember Free- 
man Clarke and Bartol and Robbins and the 
rest, — in their public meetings left the sofas 
or benches where he sat down, and withdrew 
from him, we read, as Jews from contact 
with a leper, then a little company of gen- 
tlemen met together, passed one resolution, 
and went home. " Resolved, That Theodore 



102 The Influence of Emerson 

Parker shall have a hearing in Boston." To 
my mind, that was one of the most remark- 
able church councils ever held. The Coun- 
cil of Trent did not accomplish so much as 
that in its whole six years. 

I speak to you of Emerson and Parker 
to-day, while the flowers laid on the grave 
of Emerson are still fragrant, because I 
would invoke the influence of this eloquent 
and solemn hour to impress more deeply 
upon every soul of us the duties of openness 
to new ideas, of scorn of compromise, and 
of self-reliance.* I wish that in this hour 
we may bethink ourselves more gratefully 
what the darkness was into which these great 
souls let in the light by which we walk ; and 
I wish that, turning from our secularities 
and societies and strifes, we may, amid these 
sacramental memories, more seriously fix our 
minds upon the infinite God, the immortal 
life, and the eternal right, in the conscious- 
ness of which they reposed and made true 
religion to consist, and to consist alone. 

*This address was first given soon after the death of Emerson, 
and this original occasional character, manifest in much of it, I have 
not sought to change, although certain references in the paper as now 
printed are of later date. 



Emerson and Theodore Parker 103 

Were this a biographical study, much 
should be said of the personal and literary- 
relations of the two great thinkers ; but at 
these we may here give but the merest glance. 
Parker had met Emerson almost two years 
before the Harvard address, — perhaps even 
before that. While yet hardly out of the 
Divinity School, he had lectured in Concord, 
and had passed part of the evening with 
Emerson, going home to record his admira- 
tion in his journal. In the autumn of 1837 
he is in the Connecticut Valley, delighting 
in " Nature," which had appeared only the 
year before, and resenting Professor Bowen's 
attack upon it. Taking the little West Rox- 
bury parish, we find him quoting Emerson 
in his pulpit. As we find " Darwinism " in 
Emerson before Darwin, so we find it in 
Parker. Sixteen years before " The Origin 
of Species " we find him saying in a sermon : 
" In the visible world there is a law of con- 
tinuity. All is done gradually, nothing by 
leaps. Invisibly the vegetable and animal 
world approach and intermingle. In animals 
lower down you see hints that a man is yet 
to be." He contributed articles to the Dial, 



104 The Influence of Emerson 

which Emerson and Margaret Fuller edited. 
Writing of the Dial long afterwards, Emer- 
son said, " It had some numbers highly- 
important, because they contained papers by- 
Theodore Parker, which," he adds in 
tribute to Parker's popular qualities, " sold 
the numbers." The Dial lived four years, 
dying in 1844. Three years later Parker 
joined himself with Emerson and J. Eliot 
Cabot to edit the Massachusetts Quarterly 
Review, which was also loved by the gods and 
died young, — younger even than the Dial; 
but it was made memorable by the Editor's 
Address, written by Emerson, and by Parker's 
papers upon Channing and upon Emerson 
himself. No so important general review 
of Emerson's writings had before appeared. 
It may fitly be compared in its office with 
Sterling's early review of Carlyle. Its ap- 
preciation of Emerson's intimacy with nature, 
and his strong use of the common things of 
our plain New England life, is clear and 
beautiful, and not less striking its recogni- 
tion of the catholicity, sanity, and humor 
with which Emerson makes philosophy and 
poetry out of struggling thinkers of every 



Emerson and Theodore Parker 105 

stripe, — " the conservative who thinks the 
nation is lost if his ticket chance to miscarry, 
the bigot worshipping the knot-hole through 
which a dusty beam of light has looked in 
upon his darkness, the radical who declares 
that nothing is good if established, and the 
patent reformer who screams in your ears 
that he can finish the world with a single 
touch." Comparing Emerson with our 
other American writers, Parker declared that 
his fame and influence would outlast them 
all. Emerson's editorial address had been 
full of the spirit which he himself so justly 
ascribes to Parker. There is the Parker 
spirit in his word upon the religious problem 
and condition of the time ; the spirit in his 
word upon the political character of the time 
which later inspired alike Parker's words and 
his own upon both Daniel Webster and John 
Brown ; the Parker discontent with mere 
bigness in America unmatched by moral 
greatness. Only our geography and material 
activities were colossal : no commensurate 
genius was yet reported, <c no speech heard 
but that of the auctioneers, newsboys, and the 
caucus." " Where," he exclaimed, " is the 



106 The Influence of Emerson 

great breath of the New World, the voice of 
aboriginal nations opening new eras with 
hymns of lofty cheer?" That breath was 
already finding utterance in his question and 
demand, in the words which he was speak- 
ing month by month to young men in college 
halls and to the American people from plat- 
forms east and west, in country and in 
town ; it was finding utterance in the sermons 
and lectures of Parker ; it had found utter- 
ance in the things of religion, for a genera- 
tion, in the words and life of Channing, who 
had died five years before, and who was in so 
true and large a sense the spiritual father of 
both Emerson and Parker. 

This peculiar obligation to Channing of 
both Emerson and Parker must not be 
passed unrecognized, even in the briefest 
survey of their religious work and influence. 
The three names must be grouped together. 
They make our great triumvirate in the 
realm of religious progress and reform. 
They had the same high idealistic philoso- 
phy ; they stood for the same rational 
method ; and they had alike that reverence 
for the soul and that lofty social ideal which 



Emerson and Theodore Parker 107 

made them as earnest and constant workers 
in the field of politics and whatever con- 
cerned man's freedom and growth as in the 
field of religion. Emerson was born in the 
very year, 1803, that Channing was ordained 
and installed as minister of the Federal 
Street Church ; and he grew up in a commu- 
nity, and especially in a family circle, per- 
vaded by Channing's influence. In 1821, 
while he was a student at Harvard College, 
he heard Channing deliver the Dudleian 
Lecture there, and expressed his admiration 
of it as the fruit of cc moral imagination " and 
" the highest species of reasoning upon di- 
vine subjects." He began his studies for 
the ministry under Channing's direction ; 
and soon after the completion of his studies 
we find him preaching in Channing's pulpit. 
He pays tribute to Channing's genius and 
influence as among the more immediate early 
causes of the Transcendental movement. 
The American Unitarian Association, of 
which Channing was chosen president, was 
formed, by auspicious coincidence, on Em- 
erson's birthday, May 25, 1825 ; and Emer- 
son was one of its first missionary preachers. 



108 The Influence of Emerson 

Of Channing's address on " Spiritual Free- 
dom," given soon after the formation of 
the Association, Mr. Chadwick justly says, 
"We do not wonder at Emerson's delight 
in Channing when we read this superb an- 
ticipation of his own c Self-reliance/ " Mr. 
Chadwick marshals various passages of the 
kind that "made Emerson bless Channing 
as one of those who had said his good things 
before him. ,, Channing was almost as im- 
patient as Emerson himself with the growth 
of what he called a " Unitarian orthodoxy." 
His deafness kept him from Emerson's early 
Boston lectures ; but his daughter heard 
them with joy, and borrowed the manu- 
scripts to read to her father, in whom they 
also found hearty response. When others 
condemned Emerson for his Harvard ad- 
dress, Channing defended him ; and he grew 
steadily younger, more hospitable, and more 
prophetic, as he grew older. " In our wan- 
tonness," said Emerson, " we often flout 
Dr. Channing, and say he is getting old. 
But as soon as he is ill, we remember he is 
our bishop, and that we have not done with 
him yet " ; and on the centennial of Chan- 



Emerson and Theodore Parker 109 

ning's birth, April 7, 1880, two years before 
his own death, he went from Concord to 
Newport, to be present at the laying of the 
corner-stone of the new Channing Memorial 
Church. 

Parker was no sooner settled in his West 
Roxbury parish than we find him going to 
Channing often for help in solving his press- 
ing religious problems. He borrows books 
of him, and discusses with him Strauss's 
Life of Jesus. Channing was now some- 
times preaching sermons which Dr. Gannett 
thought "suited to do more harm than 
good " ; and Parker writes, " If Dr. Chan- 
ning were a young man of five-and-twenty, 
all unknown to fame, holding the same re- 
ligious, philosophical, political, and social 
opinions as now, and preaching on them as 
he does, he could not find a place for the 
sole of his foot in Boston, though half a 
dozen pulpits were vacant." Years before 
the controversy over Emerson's Harvard 
address and Parker's sermon, Channing said : 
" The truth is, and it ought not to be dis- 
guised, that our ultimate reliance is and must 
be upon reason. If a professed revelation 



no The Influence of Emerson 

seems to us plainly to disagree with itself or 
clash with great principles which we cannot 
question, we ought not to hesitate in with- 
holding from it our belief. I am surer that 
my rational nature is from God than that any 
book is the expression of his will." Parker 
went often to a little club to which Channing 
went, at the home of his friend and parish- 
ioner, Jonathan Phillips ; and writing of 
one of these " Socratic meetings," where 
Channing was the Socrates, and the theme 
was Progress, Parker says, u Had the con- 
versation been written out by Plato, it would 
equal any of his beautiful Dialogues." A 
week later the subject for the club's discus- 
sion was a recent lecture of Emerson's. 
Channing was no more troubled by Parker's 
South Boston sermon than by Emerson's 
Harvard address ; and when, the next year, 
Channing died, Parker wrote to a friend : 
" No man in America has done so much to 
promote truth, virtue, and religion as he. I 
feel that I have lost one of the most valu- 
able friends I ever had. His mind was wide, 
and his heart was wider yet." In his jour- 
nal he wrote, " No man since Washington 



Emerson and Theodore Parker in 

has done so much to elevate his country. " 
Parker's memorial sermon at the time, and 
his more exhaustive paper in the Massachu- 
setts Review a few years later, are among 
the noblest tributes ever paid to Channing's 
character and work. 

I link the names of Emerson and Parker 
here, because in the things of religion they 
cannot be separated.* They stand for the 
same thing. Emerson was Parker writing 
books. Parker was Emerson's truth in the 
pulpit. " What Emerson uttered without 
plot or plan," William Gannett says well, 
"Theodore Parker elaborated to a system. 
Parker was the Paul of Transcendentalism." 
When there was almost no warm hand for 

♦James Freeman Clarke, reviewing Parker's "Discourse of 
Matters Pertaining to Religion," which he called " the new gospel of 
shallow naturalism," spoke of Parker as " the expounder of Negative 
Transcendentalism, as Mr. R. W. Emerson is the expounder of Positive 
Transcendentalism." Forty years later Mr. Clarke edited an edition 
of Parker's sermons for the Unitarian Association. The Unitarians 
were holding their annual festival on the evening of the day in May, 
i860, when the news of Parker's death reached Boston 5 and then and 
there, from the depths of his heart, Mr. Clarke, who twenty -two years 
later was to conduct Emerson's funeral at Concord, paid a noble tribute 
to his friend. In his tribute to Emerson prepared for the Massachu- 
setts Historical Society he drew a parallelism between Emerson and 
Parker, which it is interesting to compare with his early word. 



ii2 The Influence of Emerson 

Parker in Boston, it was his wont to visit 
Emerson often at Concord ; and he always 
returned to his work quickened and inspired. 
At one of Emerson's lectures in Boston, 
when the storm against Parker was fiercest, 
a lecture at which a score of the religious 
and literary leaders of the city were present, 
Emerson, as he laid his manuscript upon the 
desk and looked over the audience after his 
wont, observed Parker ; and immediatly he 
stepped from the platform to the seat near 
the front where Parker sat, grasping his 
hand and standing for a moment's conversa- 
tion with him. It was not ostentation, and 
it was not patronage : it was admiring friend- 
ship, — and that fortification and stimulus 
Parker in those times never failed to feel. 
It was Emerson who fed his lamp, he 
said ; and Emerson said that, be the lamp fed 
as it might, it was Parker whom the time 
to come would have to thank for finding the 
lamp burning. Their differences in temper- 
ament and method were obvious enough. 
Parker wielded the mallet of Thor. Emer- 
son, as Dr. Holmes so finely said, was " an 
iconoclast without a hammer, who took 



Emerson and Theodore Parker 113 

down our idols from their pedestals so ten- 
derly that it seemed like an act of worship." 
Father Taylor would not have been so 
sure of Parker's easy pathway into heaven 
as he was sure of Emerson's. But their 
aim was the same. " Parker," said Emer- 
son, "is the soldier whom God gave 
strength and will to fight for him the 
battle of the day." " Emerson," said Parker, 
"has a more glorious history than any 
American of this generation. He has touched 
the deepest strings on the human harp, and, 
ten centuries after he is immortal, will wake 
music which he first waked." He dedicated 
to Emerson his cc Ten Sermons of Religion " ; 
and when, at last, all broken in the fight, he 
sailed away in search of the health which he 
should never find, his greatest comfort was 
in saying, as he sat on the deck on Sunday 
morning, " Emerson is preaching at Music 
Hall to-day." When he died there at 
Florence, no churchman's voice was heard at 
the funeral in Music Hall, but the words of 
Emerson and Phillips. 

" He has gone down in early glory to his 
grave," said Emerson, " to be a living and 



ii4 The Influence of Emerson 

enlarging power wherever learning, wit, 
honest valor, and independence are hon- 
ored." "The vice charged against Amer- 
ica," he continued, "is the want of sincerity 
in leading men. It does not lie at Parker's 
door. He never kept back the truth for 
fear to make an enemy. It was his merit, 
like Luther, Knox, Latimer, and John 
Baptist, to speak tart truth when that was 
peremptory and when there were few to say 
it. As a reformer, he insisted beyond all 
men in pulpits that the essence of Christian- 
ity is its practical morals : it is there for use, 
or it is nothing ; and if you combine it with 
sharp trading or private intemperance or 
successful fraud or immoral politics or un- 
just wars or the cheating of Indians, it is an 
hypocrisy and the truth is not in you, . . . 
and no love of religious music or praise of 
John Wesley or of Jeremy Taylor can save 
you from the Satan which you are. Ah, 
my brave brother ! " cried Emerson in clos- 
ing, " it seems as if, in a frivolous age, our 
loss were immense, and your place cannot 
be supplied. But you will already be con- 
soled in the transfer of your genius, know- 



Emerson and Theodore Parker 115 

ing well that the nature of the world will 
affirm to all men, in all times, that which for 
twenty-five years you valiantly spoke ; that 
the winds of Italy murmur the same truth 
over your grave, the winds of America over 
these bereaved streets ; that the sea which 
bore your mourners home affirms it, the 
stars in their courses, and the inspirations of 
youth ; whilst the polished and pleasant 
traitors to human rights, with perverted 
learning and disgraced graces, rot and are 
forgotten with their double tongue." 

Years afterwards, as Emerson wrote his 
historic notes of New England life and 
thought in the time of the Transcendental 
movement, published after his death, he 
paid this further tribute, not a few phrases 
of which almost parallel the lines in Lowell's 
famous portrait : " Theodore Parker was 
our Savonarola, an excellent scholar, in frank 
and affectionate communication with the 
best minds of his day, yet the tribune of the 
people, and the stout Reformer to urge and 
defend every cause of humanity with and for 
the humblest of mankind. He was no 
artist. Highly refined persons might easily 



n6 The Influence of Emerson 

miss in him the element of beauty. What 
he said was mere fact, almost offended you, 
so bald and detached ; little cared he. He 
stood altogether for practical truth ; and so 
to the last. He used every day and hour 
of his short life, and his character appeared 
in the last moments with the same firm con- 
trol as in the mid-day of strength. I habit- 
ually apply to him the words of a French 
philosopher who speaks of c the man of 
Nature who abominates the steam-engine 
and the factory. His vast lungs breathe 
independence with the air of the mountains 
and the woods/ " 

After Parker's death his society desired 
Emerson, the next autumn, to give the 
first sermon for them in Music Hall. The 
treatment Parker had received had alienated 
Emerson more than ever from the Unita- 
rians, and he had long before abandoned 
all thought of ever preaching again. But 
he said that he could stand where Parker 
had stood ; and he not only preached on 
that first Sunday, but spoke in Parker's pulpit 
many times for several years. He was the 
only man large enough for that place, the 



Emerson and Theodore Parker 117 

one man who stood roundly for the truth 
which Parker preached. These two Ameri- 
cans seem to me the two greatest religious 
teachers and reformers of our century, — in- 
comparably beyond Dollinger and Hyacinthe 
and that class of reformers, whose work 
was really all done three hundred years ago ; 
wiser far than Beecher and Bushnell and 
Maurice and Stanley and the sundry sorts 
of Broad Churchmen, whose new wine al- 
ready spills from the old bottles which it 
was foolish to use ; greater than Carlyle, by 
so much as their faith in essential humanity 
was greater than his. The test of leader- 
ship and influence is the degree to which 
the thinker seizes and embodies that which 
is to determine and abide. Here is our New 
Puritanism. The Erasmusisms of our time, 
amiable and emancipated, have not the Puri- 
tan credentials. Emerson and Parker, — 
these are they in whom John Calvin and 
John Milton, George Fox and William 
Penn would in the nineteenth century 
have found true and real kinship. 

The first service which I wish this subject 
might perform for us is to impress anew the 



n8 The Influence of Emerson 

duty of openness to new ideas. Feeble, 
indeed, here are any words of mine beside 
the emphasis of history itself and new 
events. I have thought that it must be im- 
possible for any man who has lived in these 
last years and learned two of their great 
lessons ever again to be a bigot. A much 
briefer time than even my own life covers 
has seen the outcome of the careers of Will- 
iam Lloyd Garrison and Charles Darwin. 
I can remember a time when Garrison's life 
was hardly yet safe on Boston Common. 
Some here, not old men yet, can remember 
when great rewards were offered for his 
arrest, when he lay in jail in Baltimore, 
when he was dragged by a rope, half-naked, 
through the streets of Boston. We can 
remember, too, how, just as John Brown's 
musketry was rattling at Harper's Ferry, a 
book was laid on the library table, called 
" The Origin of Species " ; and we can re- 
member the noise that followed, much louder 
than John Brown's musketry, for almost 
twenty years. " Darwinism " was the butt 
of every Punch's jokes, the target of all satire, 
the object of the venom and vituperation of 



Emerson and Theodore Parker 119 

the pulpit and the religious newspaper. I 
suppose that half the sermons that many of 
us have heard in all our sermon-hearing 
Sundays have been on " Christianity and 
Darwinism," or some variation of the theme ; 
and in most mouths the phrase long meant 
about the same as God and the devil. If 
a preacher confessed Darwinism, he was a 
doomed man. If a professor confessed Dar- 
winism, his theological-school days, some- 
times his college days, were done. If the 
divinity student were caught hospitably 
housing " The Origin of Species," it were 
better for him, so far as pulpit aspirations 
went, that he had never been born. 

Well, we saw Garrison borne to the tomb 
amidst the reverence and tears of a nation 
which, if it should build a monument to- 
morrow to commemorate its new life and 
salvation, would place his figure at the front, 
as the central bearer of the redemptive idea. 
And just as New England was bearing Em- 
erson to his grave, Old England, while the 
bells tolled and the white-robed boys sang 
anthems, laid Darwin to rest in Westminster 
Abbey, beside Newton and Johnson and 



120 The Influence of Emerson 

Chatham and Chaucer and those whom she 
delighteth to honor. The mockers and 
satirists of a few years ago are the elegists 
and eulogists of to-day. There are few men 
of science who have not now placed Darwin's 
truth alongside the fundamental theories of 
Newton and Copernicus ; and no pulpit has 
yet been heard from which, if not manly 
enough to join in the panegyric, has been 
base enough to echo its old follies or is not 
busy in the work of reconstruction and new 
accommodation. I cannot think that these 
two lessons will easily be forgotten by this 
generation. I cannot think that those of us 
who study politics and science, or venture to 
speak of them at all, will ever, after witness- 
ing this abuse and then this apotheosis of 
Garrison and Darwin, be hurried to condemn 
any thoughtful and earnest man unheard ; 
and I think that the Church will be cautious 
before it again compromises itself with se- 
rious men, swells the bad reputation of caring 
more for its creeds than for the truth, and 
damages the cause of religion itself, as it has 
done in the Darwin controversy. 

As the crown of thorns and then the 



Emerson and Theodore Parker 121 

laurel wreath to Garrison and Darwin in the 
realms of politics and science, so in the realm 
of morals and religion the rejection of Em- 
erson and Parker forty years ago and the 
glory which is theirs to-day. I suppose 
there has been no so conspicuous case of 
persecution in the American religious world 
in the century as that of Theodore Parker, 
and no man ever who was the object of bit- 
terer malice, misrepresentation, and execra- 
tion in his lifetime than he. He was a man 
who had no delight in controversy. He 
was not by choice or first nature a fighter, 
though certainly a better fighter never lived. 
He was a scholar, with all the scholar's love 
of quiet and retirement and the library. 
He was a man whose whole warm, affection- 
ate nature craved love and sympathy and the 
good opinion of his fellows. Yet he was 
forced, by the rank abuses of the times and 
by the infidelities of men, into lifelong con- 
flict ; though in that conflict he never once 
shot back a poisoned arrow, seldom opened 
a personal controversy, but fought and con- 
quered simply by preaching straight on, re- 
gardless of criticism or abuse on the right 



122 The Influence of Emerson 

hand or the left, the great positive prin- 
ciples of an irresistible gospel. 

The treatment which Parker received 
from those who advertised themselves as 
" liberal " and from those who did not was 
much the same. The Unitarians of fifty 
years ago, as Parker's biographer has said, 
were " about as complacent a set of Chris- 
tians as ever took ship for the kingdom." 
It was not the heroic age of Unitarianism. 
Aside from Dr. Channing and a dozen 
others who might be named, the clergy seem 
to have been, if their sayings and doings in 
the Emerson and Parker controversies give 
their measure, a petrified and asphyxiated 
set of men, as destitute of red blood as 
the pre-Raphaelite saints. If they had any 
positive maxim, it was, to use a phrase of 
Emerson's elsewhere applied, " By taste 
are ye saved," — by propriety ; but for the 
most part, as Emerson himself put it, their 
creed was only a " pale negation." Their 
conspicuous theological occupation was to 
deny the divinity of Christ, — a melancholy 
business ; and they had not yet learned 
that Christ was human. Parker's persua- 



Emerson and Theodore Parker 123 

sion was that no body of men was ever more 
completely sold to the sense of expediency. 
They were, indeed, " the advance guard of 
the Church militant in America." They 
had been " the movement party in the- 
ology," and had done a praiseworthy work. 
They had repudiated creed subscription, 
and declared the right of each man to in- 
vestigate for himself in matters of religion. 
But a reaction was now springing up. A 
Unitarian orthodoxy had been tacitly agreed 
upon, and the main endeavor of the elders 
seemed to be to prevent any sort of com- 
motion and to keep things decent and in 
order. 

When a man like Theodore Parker came 
into such a circle as that, an honest man and 
a rugged, a man who could not compromise, 
but who must and would speak out the 
truth that was in him, a man whose every 
word was "fierily furnaced in the blast 
of a life that had struggled in earnest/ ' — 
when such a man, I say, came into such a 
circle, there could be but one result. The 
controlling men of the denomination said, 
This young man must be silenced ! They 



124 The Influence of Emerson 

closed their pulpits and their periodicals to 
him, they tried to alienate his little congre- 
gation, they wrote abusive letters, they 
refused to occupy the same platform, to 
trade at the same shop, to remain in the 
same room with him. They excommuni- 
cated him, put him out of the Church. 
Many of the brethren had said to him 
before : " You are right, you say the truth ; 
but it won't do. Don't preach it. He that 
spits in the wind spits in his own face. You 
will ruin yourself, and do nobody any 
good ! " And, when the trial came, man 
after man on whom Parker had reckoned 
for countenance fell back upon the old 
guard and was silent. " Alas," he wrote, 
" for that man who consents to think one 
thing in his closet and preach another in 
his pulpit ! God shall judge him in his 
mercy. But over his study and over his 
pulpit must be written, Emptiness; on his 
forehead and right hand, Deceit, deceit ! " 

If these things were done in the green 
tree, what was to be expected in the dry? 
Parker was the special object of the prayers 
and maledictions of the American churches 



Emerson and Theodore Parker 125 

for twenty years. Priestly malice, as Phillips 
said, scanned every inch of his garment ; but 
" it was seamless, it could find no stain." 
He saw men stare at him in the street, and 
point and say, " That is Theodore Parker ! " 
and look at him as if he were a murderer. 
Prayer-meetings were held on his particular 
account. During the great revival of 1858 
it was recommended that men and women, 
wherever they might be, in the shop or on 
the street, should pray for Parker daily 
when the clock struck one. " We know 
that we cannot argue him down," they said ; 
" but, O Lord, put a hook in his jaws, so 
that he may not be able to speak ! If he 
will still persist in speaking, induce the 
people to leave him, and come up and fill 
this house instead of that ! " " Hell never 
vomited forth a more wicked and blasphe- 
mous monster than Theodore Parker," said 
one of the noted evangelists, " and it is only 
the mercies of Jesus Christ which have kept 
him from eternal damnation already " ; and 
then he prayed: "If this man is a subject 
of grace, O Lord, convert him and bring 
him into the kingdom of thy Son ; but, if 



126 The Influence of Emerson 

he is beyond the reach of the saving influ- 
ence of the gospel, remove him out of the 
way, and let his influence die with him ! " 

And Parker himself through all this ? It 
did not surprise him, for he knew human 
nature. He knew that in no country and 
in no age would he have encountered so 
little persecution as he did encounter. He 
knew that this bitterness and falsehood were 
but the natural fruits of the hard and dark 
theology against which he rose to do battle. 
" I knew all this would come," he said. 
"It has come from my religion; and I 
would not forego that religion for all this 
world can give. I have borne sorrows that 
bow men together till they can in no wise 
lift up themselves. But my comfort has 
been the joy of religion, my delight is the 
infinite God ; and that has sustained me." 
" If I fall and die," he said, as he sailed away, 
"let mine enemies rejoice as much as they 
will at the thought that there is one feeble 
voice the less rebuking the vice of the Press, 
the State, the Market, and the Church ; one 
voice the less to speak a word for truth, 
freedom, justice, and natural religion. Let 



Emerson and Theodore Parker 127 

them triumph in this ; but let them expect 
no greater result to follow from my death. 
For to the success of the great truths I have 
taught, it is now but of the smallest conse- 
quence whether I preach in Boston and the 
lyceums of the North or my body crumbles 
in some quiet, nameless grave. They are 
not my truths. A great Truth of Humanity 
once set a-going, it is in the charge of 
humanity. Neither State nor Press nor 
Market nor Church can ever put it down. 
It will drown the water men pour on it, and 
quench their hostile fire. Cannot the Bible 
teach its worshippers that a grave is no dun- 
geon to shut up Truth in? It is one thing 
to rejoice at the sickness and death of a 
short-lived heretic ; but it is another and a 
different to alter the constitution of the 
universe and put down a fact of spon- 
taneous human consciousness, which also is 
a Truth of God." 

When he lay dying there in Florence, he 
said earnestly, in one of the gleams of light 
that came at intervals across the weakness : 
" There are two Theodore Parkers now, — 
one is dying here in Italy, the other 1 have 



128 The Influence of Emerson 

planted in America. He will live there, 
and finish my work." And, as the sun 
looked down upon the half-dozen mourners 
and the friend who read the Beatitudes over 
his grave on the banks of the Arno, the 
same sun lighted up the arches of Music 
Hall as his dearer friend, unconscious of 
that scene in Italy, stepped into his own 
desk, and opened one of his own sermons to 
the text, " Have faith in God." 

It was a Sunday in May, i860, the year 
so heavy with forebodings of that final trag- 
ical struggle with slavery, so much more 
desperate than the heroic struggle he had 
himself kept up so long. On a midsummer 
day of the next year, Mrs. Browning was 
laid to rest near him ; and, in the autumn 
afterward, Arthur Hugh Clough. Three 
years more, and Landor was borne to the 
same little Protestant graveyard in the 
Florence where Emerson had sought him 
out, on his first European journey, thirty 
years before. In the five years the four 
whose memories have made that peaceful 
God's acre forever sacred were there com- 
mitted to Italian earth together, among the 



Emerson and Theodore Parker 129 

Italian cypresses, beneath the soft Italian 
skies. How many Emerson memories con- 
centrate there ! Clough, still at Oxford, had 
become one of Emerson's dearest friends 
during his English days in 1 848 ; and when, 
four years later, he came to spend a year in 
our own Cambridge, it was at Emerson's 
urging, and to find in Emerson the Amer- 
ican whom he most admired and loved. It 
was in Emerson's society that Parker came 
to know him ; and I think that no words 
testify with exacter faithfulness the inflexible 
faith of Parker through his long life-battle 
than those lines of Clough : — 

" It fortifies my soul to know 
That, though I perish, Truth is so : 
That, howsoe'er I stray and range, 
Whate'er I do, Thou dost not change. 
I steadier step when I recall 
That, if I slip, Thou dost not fall. " 

It is sacramental for the American to 
stand alone by Parker's grave in the little 
Florence graveyard, and send his thoughts 
across the sea as Parker sent his thoughts in 
that last earthly hour. If it be gray No- 



130 The Influence of Emerson 

vember, with the cold Alps just left behind ; 
if, freighted with some cumulation of dark 
facts or sad misgivings, you be heavy- 
hearted and of little faith ; if even Giotto's 
tower and San Giovanni's gates have failed 
in their power to charm, — that stern gray 
stone by the gray grave, if you let it speak 
its faithful speech in the still hour, will 
make the weak heart start again and tell 
you strongly to have faith in God and in 
God's triumph in his world ; and, as you 
turn back into the city, the streets, before 
perhaps so cold and unresponsive, shall be 
all eloquent with history and beauty ; each 
boy upon the sidewalk shall be a Dante or 
Michel Angelo in making; and the dear 
home country for which you kept such sad 
vigil shall seem haloed by the sunset as a 
sure potential republic of God, all populous 
with Parkers and Emersons. 

So it is sacramental at this hour, when we 
have pictured the generation gone, with all 
the bigotry and blindness and " propriety " 
that make us sick, to pause and remember 
that Emerson and Parker have become ac- 
credited saints in the calendar, the Harvard 



Emerson and Theodore Parker 131 

address and the South Boston sermon Uni- 
tarian tracts ; to remember how upon the 
table of every thoughtful minister of relig- 
ion in the land, be he called " liberal " or 
"orthodox," the Prayers of Parker lie, to 
stimulate and voice devotion ; and feel, 
through door and window, the air pulsating 
still with the universal benediction falling on 
the grave of Emerson. And, remembering 
and feeling this, let us say to ourselves per- 
suasively, when hearts seem cold and the 
fight is long and the false seems strong and 
the day is weary, Have faith in God and the 
power of his might, and know, indeed, that 
one with him is a majority. 

" Oh, blest is he to whom is given 
The instinct that can tell 
That God is on the field, when he 
Is most invisible. 

" And blest is he who can divine 
Where real right doth lie, 
And dares to take the side that seems 
Wrong to man's blindfold eye." 

1 know of nothing that can impress more 
deeply the duties of openness to new ideas, 



132 The Influence of Emerson 

of scorn of compromise, and of self-reliance 
than the story of these two lives. I know 
of nothing grander than Parkers pulpit, as 
it stood there for twenty years, amid the 
shuffling and truckling of those times, thun- 
dering of righteousness and judgment to 
come. I should like to have been of those 
earnest thousands who, Sunday after Sunday, 
went up to Music Hall to hear him preach. 
No trumped-up, twenty-minute speeches 
those, confectional and condimental, such as 
some of our weak-backed congregations sit 
through with difficulty even, but solid ser- 
mons of an hour, or two hours if need were, 
that sent the people home with their ears 
tingling for a week. No place that for a 
lazy head. Men told him that he was 
preaching over the heads of the people ; but 
none ever had to tell him that he was doing 
that much commoner thing, preaching under 
their feet. Not a school for the exquisite 
graces of etiquette : Parker was not a rival 
of the dancing-master. Boston had exhibi- 
tions plenteous of suaviter in modo; his 
business was with fortiter in re, " You 
never made me your minister," he said, " to 



Emerson and Theodore Parker 133 

flatter or to please, but to instruct and 
serve." Those who wore soft raiment, in 
those days, dwelt in kings' houses ; he wore 
camel's hair and a leathern girdle, and the 
words fell from his lips sharp and rugged as 
from the Baptist's, — " Repent ! Wrath to 
come ! " He preached against the errors of 
the popular theology more than upon any 
other form of wrong, for he felt that they 
were most fatally mischievous of all. But, 
like all those New England Transcendental- 
ists, he had much to say upon all the burn- 
ing questions of social reform. The Church 
was here in the world for nothing at all, if 
not to hold up a higher standard of life and 
create a better society. Intemperance, covet- 
ousness, ignorance, the wrongs of woman, war, 
political corruption, above all, slavery, — like 
grape-shot were the sermons rained upon 
them all. As it was Garrison who fought 
slavery with the newspaper, and Phillips on 
the bema, and Whittier with the poem, and 
Sumner in the Senate, and John Brown on 
the scaffold, and Lincoln with the sword of 
State, so it was Parker who fought it with 
the gospel in the pulpit, while the church- 



134 The Influence of Emerson 

men of good and regular standing, whose 
heads had felt the bishop's fingers, shivered 
before the bullying of the slaveholders, chat- 
tered about Onesimus, and whined, " Cursed 
be Canaan ! " 

But the most precious of the great preach- 
er's sermons were not those which attacked 
society nor those which attacked the 
Church, but those in which he lifted his 
hearers up into the comfort of the mighty 
faith and trust wherewith he himself was 
comforted of God, and sent them forth to 
the duties of life with the divine pledge of 
victory and fruition. " The first time I 
heard Theodore Parker preach," writes 
Louisa Alcott, — who has passed the torch 
along in books so full of gospel to so many 
" little women," and to men as well, — " was 
a memorable day to me, as such occasions 
doubtless were to many others who c came 
to wonder, and remained to pray/ The 
sermon was addressed to c laborious young 
women/ and was full of paternal advice, en- 
couragement, and sympathy ; but the prayer 
that followed went straight to the hearts of 
those for whom he prayed, not only com- 



Emerson and Theodore Parker 135 

forting by its tenderness and strengthening 
by its brave and cheerful spirit, but showing 
them where to go for greater help, and how 
to ask it as simply and confidingly as he did. 
It was a quiet talk with God, as if long in- 
tercourse and much love had made it natural 
and easy for the son to seek the Father, 
confessing faults, asking help, and submitting 
all things to the All Wise and Tender as 
freely as children bring their little sorrows, 
hopes, and fears to their mother's knee. To 
one laborious young woman, just setting 
forth to seek her fortune, that Sunday was 
the beginning of a new life, that sermon like 
the scroll given to Christian, that prayer the 
God-speed of one who was to her, as to so 
many, a valiant Great-heart leading pilgrims 
through Vanity Fair to the Celestial City." 

It is this deep, positive religion in Emer- 
son and Parker, this great faith in God and 
right and the soul, of which I would speak 
with chief emphasis, rather than of any work 
of theirs against old superstitions and in the 
service of free thought. I think there are 
not many present here who need more words 
on old superstitions and free thought, save 



136 The Influence of Emerson 

to brace them to the work of keeping the 
light shining in the dark places. I suppose 
that most of us are already "rationalized" 
almost to death ; and the everlasting on- 
slaught on the creeds, necessary as it is no 
doubt, is wearisome to some of us, like the 
crackling of thorns under the pot. We have 
quite as much light already as we can man- 
age well, and what we pray for now is more 
sweetness and very much more disposition 
to do something. Not that I would mini- 
mize the great offices of Emerson and Parker 
in the work of theological enlightenment, 
nor our own duties in the same direction. 
How great those offices were is best attested 
by the public sentiment which they created, 
able to recognize and love the truth they 
taught, and condemning, in every enlight- 
ened place, the treatment which the public 
sentiment of the middle of the century in- 
dorsed. It is attested by the greater liber- 
ality in every church in the land that stands 
on the line of railroad. It is attested by 
the decay everywhere of the belief in the old 
doctrines of infallible books, mechanical cre- 
ation, and eternal damnation. It is attested 



Emerson and Theodore Parker 137 

by the inaugurals of theological professors, 
declaring that miracle cannot longer be ap- 
pealed to as the test of truth, and by the 
clear perception of every thoughtful student 
in the schools that that is not the worthy 
conception of God's universe which finds 
best evidence of the divine in prophets rid- 
ing in chariots of fire or in great fishes, in 
the stopping of the sun and moon to light 
up slaughter, or in wonders wrought with 
water and wine or loaves and fishes, but that 
which knows that the highest freedom works 
by perfect law, and sees " in the procession of 
the stars, in every dewdrop and in every 
flower, and most in every human soul, the 
working of the present God." Our duties in 
the matter appear wherever these old doc- 
trines still have power, and men still endeavor 
to put covers on God's Bible, to limit God's 
activity to certain sections of the map, and 
to consign any soul of man to hopeless hell. 
Wherever men are found engaged in the 
bad business, however conscientious, of de- 
fending bad doctrines by the bad method of 
appeal to external and prescriptive authority, 
there we must still lift up the battle-flag of 



138 The Influence of Emerson 

Emerson and Parker, and cry, Turn on the 
lights ! 

It is not so much from superstition and 
overbelief, however, that the interests of re- 
ligion are endangered to-day as from under- 
belief and a withering of spiritual life in the 
atmosphere of a mechanical philosophy and 
ethics. The death-blow has been given to 
superstition. There are always men, of 
course, who never know that the sun has 
risen until it is noon ; and superstition will 
yet stagger on for a miserable distance before 
its final fall. But Lessing and Kant struck 
its death-blows a hundred years ago ; it 
is already ghastly from loss of blood ; and 
there is no loveliness in it more, that men 
should desire it. But in the breaking up of 
the old religious sanctions and the extension 
of the realm of law to regions where, before, 
men saw nothing but arbitrariness and im- 
pulse, God has seemed to many to be pushed 
so far away that he has been discounted al- 
together, and a mechanism running rapidly 
to a dread fatalism has seemed to leave no 
place for the idea of freedom and to grind 
up the soul. I have paid tribute to Darwin 



Emerson and Theodore Parker 139 

and his epoch-making service ; but we must 
not blind ourselves to the fact that his sci- 
ence was caught up and fathered by a poor, 
unspiritual philosophy, whose identification 
with it in the minds of a million untrained 
and uninformed religious men has abundantly 
justified their jealousy and opposition. No 
good science is so good as bad philosophy 
is bad ; and it may seriously be questioned 
whether the major influence of the doctrine 
of evolution up to date upon religious life 
and thought has not been prejudicial. It 
will be a generation yet before it takes its 
place in the world's mind where it took its 
place in the mind of Emerson long before 
Darwin wrote, and becomes blessing and in- 
spiration unalloyed. 

Tired of the false, distorted Jesus-worship 
of the churches, many manly men have 
come to listen more gladly to the words of 
almost any other of God's sons than to the 
words of Jesus, and to be found with almost 
any other name upon their lips rather than 
his, lest the merest honor to the name 
should confound them with the gross idol- 
atry. " Let me never hear that man's name 



140 The Influence of Emerson 

again ! " said the weary old Voltaire to 
the priests, when they talked to him of 
Jesus after their manner; and no man of 
rugged, stern sincerity but who, turning 
from much of the mawkish language of the 
prayer-meeting and the tract, at least can 
understand the feeling of the old iconoclast. 
So the loquacious and fulsome discipleship 
of a thin unintelligence makes us tire some 
days of the names of Bach and Wagner and 
Turner and Browning, of Washington even, 
of Carlyle and of Emerson himself. Tired 
of the superstitions, too, which have centred 
round the Bible, many have put their Bible 
on the upper shelf and thought they got 
more inspiration from Confucius and the 
Brahmins, from the new poem or new 
novel, or from the newspaper, than from the 
psalms of David or Isaiah's proohecies, the 
gospel of Christ, or the letters of Paul. 
Tired of the sluggish, unproductive dream- 
ing of " a happy land far, far away," they 
have said : Enough of this ! Here is work 
to be done, here are wrongs to be righted, 
here are men with no chance, here is the 
devil's work done in God's name. Don't 



Emerson and Theodore Parker 141 

sing to us of heaven : we have only time 
and strength to work for a new earth. And 
so the docrine of the soul has suffered ; and 
to deny immortality is thought to be a 
virtue, to some has seemed heroic. It is 
more unselfish, they say, to work nobly, 
knowing there is no hereafter to reward us 
and that we shall not see the fruition. 

Great is the nobleness in much of this, — 
in no wise to be confounded ever with the 
shallow and ignoble irreligion whose symp- 
toms and whose speech are oft-times so simi- 
lar. Greatly nobler, said Parker, is " the 
doubt of the man than the creed of the 
fool. ,, Greatly nobler often the atheist's Law 
than the churchman's God. Sublime witness 
is the protest, too, to the fact that the soul 
will not be chained. Men hate a dictum and 
a must. Legislate that your people shall 
admire the sunset, and the evening shall 
find them flocking from the hilltops to the 
gulches ; that all shall learn M The Pilgrim's 
Progress " and find no fault in it, and next 
year each literary circle shall be a " Hudi- 
bras " society. We tire of the best, will not 
be content with the best save with the better 



14 2 The Influence of Emerson 

and the good, — not on terms of insulation. 
Only the All is sacred and infallible. We 
leave the philosopher to-day for the plough- 
man ; and to-morrow our foeman shall be 
more welcome than our friend. Dante and 
Shakespeare have had times of going out of 
fashion; and Beethoven and Michael An- 
gelo are forgotten for Brahms and Botticelli 
or the new Frenchman. Yet, all the while, 
the sunset is beautiful, and Bunyan is bet- 
ter than Butler, and best is best. It were 
better that we should read Shakespeare 
always than that we should think Shelley 
and Schiller just as good ; arid the dilettanti 
who live only to glorify the pre-Raphaelites 
are not the men who do the most either for 
art or manhood. They do, indeed, do 
more for both than the devotees of a sen- 
timental Guido or a dainty Carlo Dolci, 
just as the compilers of the " sacred anthol- 
ogies " stand for a sturdier religion than the 
men who write the tracts. No men so full 
of the " sympathy of religions " as Emerson 
and Parker. Of Parker, Lowell said truly 
enough, if not indeed quite so truly as 
wittily, — 



Emerson and Theodore Parker 143 

" His hearers can't tell you on Sunday beforehand 
If in that day's discourse you'll be Bibled or 
Koraned " ; 

and what other American brought true 
spiritual apprehension to the truth of India 
and Persia so early as Emerson ? But all 
this Orientalism and comparative theology, 
which is the fashion now, invaluable and 
imperative as its office is and warmly as we 
welcome it to its right place, does us poor 
service, I think they would say, if it makes 
us fancy the Koran and the Vedas as great 
as the Bible, or Confucius and Zoroaster as 
great as Christ. 

The transcendent merit of Emerson and 
Parker as religious teachers is that they 
never opposed halfness by halfness, and were 
never hurried by impatience of superstition 
to irreverence toward the object of the 
superstition. Jesus Christ, the Bible, — 
more than any others have Emerson and 
Parker helped us to see their transcendent 
pre-eminence among books and men, be- 
cause recognizing this pre-eminence on 
the ground of freedom and pure reason. 
" People imagine," said Emerson, " that the 



144 The Influence of Emerson 

place which the Bible holds in the world 
it owes to miracle. It owes it simply to 
the fact that it came out of a profounder 
depth of thought than any other book.' , 
" Jesus Christ," he said again, " alone in 
all history estimated the greatness of man : 
this one man was true to what is in you and 
me." And Parker sang : — 

" Thy truth is still the light 
Which guides the nations groping on their way, 

Stumbling and falling in disastrous night, 
Yet hoping ever for the perfect day. 

Yes, thou art still the life ; thou art the way 
The holiest know." 

This clear and cultured maintenance at 
the centre — for it is a question of culture, 
of real and round education — of what is 
true and best comes into the flimsy anti- 
Christianism of a cheap free-thinking like 
the healthy restoration of Shakespeare after 
the things that satisfied the shallow taste of 
Queen Anne's London. The temple which 
we build of the prophets and apostles who 
through past ages have mediated truth to 
men will lack beauty, proportion, and solid- 



Emerson and Theodore Parker 145 

ity unless Jesus Christ be the chief corner- 
stone. And there was never a time when 
it was so important to say this strongly, 
despite the " Christo-centric " folk who 
mechanize and, by magnifying it into un- 
naturalness and dogma, degrade the truth, 
as the present time, when the supersti- 
tions which have made a rational grasp 
of Christ's idea so difficult are fading ; 
when society seems ripe for a more prac- 
tical appropriation of the principles — which 
it has never yet applied or tried — of 
neighborhood, equality and brotherhood, 
and the unit value of the soul, which he 
instinctively divined ; and when a people 
parched and paralyzed by mechanism, util- 
ity, and fate thirsteth for freedom and the 
living God. What our society needs to-day 
is a baptism of the Holy Ghost. " I see in 
the young men of this age," said Emerson, 
"character, but scepticism." "They have 
insight and truthfulness, they will not mask 
their convictions, they hate cant; but more 
than this I do not readily find. The 
gracious motions of the soul — piety, adora- 
tion — I do not find. Scorn of hypocrisy, 



146 The Influence of Emerson 

elegance, boundless ambition of the intellect, 
willingness to make sacrifices for integrity 
of character, but not that religious submis- 
sion and abandonment which give man a 
new element and being, and make him 
sublime." 

This is what we want. The other, with- 
out this, is not enough. Goodness itself, 
without this, lacks its final grace and beauty. 
The soul, without this, is in the end dis- 
torted, maimed, and dumb. " Unlovely," said 
Emerson, in his last public religious utterance, 
speaking, as in 1838, to the Harvard stu- 
dents of religion, " unlovely j nay, frightful, 
is the solitude of the soul which is without 
God in the world." It is so. The man 
who has looked into the pit — and how 
many such there have been, Cloughs, Hallams, 
Sterlings, Robertsons, of every degree, in 
the sad period now passing, I believe, into a 
period more positive and glad ! — knows that 
it is so. The man who has seen the sun 
shine without power to cheer, and who has 
learned to look into the starry heavens with 
irreverent incuriousness, who hears no music 
in the rolling sea, and sees no vision where 



Emerson and Theodore Parker 147 

it fades into the sky, to whom the brook in 
the forest sings not, and who finds naught 
but flint and granite in the everlasting hills, 
to whom summer is only a waiting for winter, 
the earth a graveyard, men and their cities 
spectral, and his friend and the love that 
loves him incredible and unauthentic like him- 
self, — he knows that it is frightful to know 
no Being behind the seeming, no living Will 
that shall endure, no Soul of beauty, no 
everlasting answering Thought, — frightful 
to be without God in the world. If my 
word come to any single soul who, like Paul 
with beasts, has fought with death, and to 
whose innermost experience it speaks, I say 
to you that, were there indeed no Soul in 
nature and no hereafter, nobility and good- 
ness would still be good and noble. It would 
be better to love than to hate, to help than 
to sleep, to be brave and true than to be false 
and cowards. The man who tells you that, if 
this life be all, it matters not what you do, 
preaches swine's gospel and the devil's ; he 
smells of brimstone and is libertine at heart. 
When the virtue of eternity is in a man, — the 
fact of our eternity is in no wise dependent on 



148 The Influence of Emerson 

our speculation, — he will live according to 
the forms of eternity, though his prospect 
be but a day. If this life be all, then make 
it count ; and a seventy years' lease of this 
universe, with all its opportunities and joys 
and disciplines, is much. Life may still be 
great and noble, I say ; and, whatever our 
philosophy, we are bound, in reverence of 
the inward mystery and the horizon's sup- 
plication, to make it so. If the proclama- 
tion of a godless universe and the soul's 
death be a glad new evangel that shall bring 
new liberty and power, as Emerson's and 
Parker's gospel brought liberty and power 
in ridding us of other chains, then indeed let 
us give heed, lest haply we be found fight- 
ing against godlessness ! If this gospel 
speaks to you most persuasively in the hour 
of your highest aspiration and most self- 
sacrificing endeavor, listen to it. Whenever 
it comes preached by the thinker and the 
lover, listen to it. 

" But if, when faith has fallen asleep, 
You hear a voice, l Believe no more,' 
And hear an ever-breaking shore 
That tumbles in a godless deep," 



Emerson and Theodore Parker 149 

and the sound is not music to you, but 
a dread sound, yet if, in your continuous 
round of business and society and cellular 
thinking, you have dulled yourself into com- 
placent listening, stop, and ask yourself what 
your life means and whither it is tending. 

Say to the man who tells you that faith in 
God is a hindrance to earth's regeneration 
and to devotion to mankind that, when the 
atheistic teacher comes who shall prompt 
to nobler endeavor than Emerson and Parker, 
the atheistic martyr who shall suffer for the 
suffering more gladly than John Brown, 
the atheistic pioneer of civilization more 
dauntless than the Puritans of Plymouth, 
the atheistic apostle of any truth more zeal- 
ous and more bold than Paul, the atheistic 
Christ who shall inspire self-sacrifice more 
heroic and discipleship nobler and purer 
than Jesus, — then, but also not till then, 
will you believe that faith in God is false- 
hood to humanity. Believe me, such poor 
notion, though it may pass to-day, cannot 
stand the test of life to-morrow and to-mor- 
row and to-morrow. And when it is said 
that the doctrine of the soul's immortality 



150 The Influence of Emerson 

is selfish and harmful to humanity, and that 
a new earth can be built only on the ruins 
of the faith in the hereafter, say that when 
you find yourself tempted to baseness and 
idleness to-day by the thought that the sun 
will rise to-morrow, when you find honor to 
your father and your mother a stumbling- 
stone to care for your children, find your 
soul so shrunken that you can be faithful to 
a new friend only by casting off an old, find 
yourself a better citizen through insularity 
and protective laws, and find yourself in- 
spired to help the sufferer round the corner 
more by slighting the men who send gospel 
and schoolmaster to the night of Africa and 
the isles of the sea, — then say you will 
believe it. When you find men agreeing 
to call it selfish to enjoy the sunshine and 
the breath of life, selfish to lift up the eyes 
unto the hills and to stand by the shore 
because the ocean is sublime and beautiful, 
selfish to open Plato and Dante and to 
thirst for knowledge, insight, growth and 
power, for any noble capacity or any great 
opportunity, — then, I say, but also not till 
then, concede the faith in the immortal 



Emerson and Theodore Parker 151 

nature of you to be a blight upon you and 
upon society and turn to the new evangel ; 
and until then tell the preacher to go learn 
clearer notions of self-sacrifice, and that he 
is the selfish man indeed who, save by sober- 
est thought prolonged and resistless con- 
viction, by moral imperative and not the 
indulgence of mental agility, impugns what 
the history of the deepest thought and the 
dearest hope and the constitution of the 
soul itself avouch motives most pure and 
potent to justice, heroism, nobility, and toil. 
No, no, my friends, this God's universe 
and the souls of us are not built upon any 
such parsimonious plan as that. There is no 
Wall Street in the soul ; no exchange, where 
to barter hope for duty. Giving is getting 
there ; and infinite responds to infinite, and 
satisfies. Draw confidently on eternity for 
all the godlike in you needs ; and it is the 
spirit of God that declares the drafts will all 
be honored. " What is excellent, ,, says 
Emerson, "as God lives, is permanent." 
" When we pronounce the name of man, we 
pronounce the belief of immortality. All 
great men find eternity affirmed in the very 



152 The Influence of Emerson 

promise of their faculties." It is so, — be- 
lieve it ; and, as incurious about the hereafter 
as about to-morrow, making your motto, if 
you will, that strong Emersonian word of 
Thoreau's, " One world at a time ! " live 
your life faithfully and confidently, and do 
this day's duty well. For this day, too, is 
God's day ; and all eternity is one. 

Our debt to Emerson and Parker, I say, 
is greatest, not for their onslaughts on 
debasing superstitions and their service to 
free thought, but for a faith made perfect 
in reason in the soul's freedom and great 
affirmations, the eternal right, the immortal 
life, and the infinite God. My brothers, 
let not the torch shine dimmer for having 
come to our hands in its progress ! Infinite 
is the responsibility laid upon us. Our 
prophets are falling in the high places. 
These have been years of death. Upon 
the heads of Whittier and Martineau and 
Tennyson the hoar-frost already lay as 
Emerson went. The tolling of the bells 
of Concord spoke not only of the passing 
of Emerson, but of the closing of an era, 
and told us that we are left to ourselves 



Emerson and Theodore Parker 153 

now. It is the signal for higher duties and 
the call to nobler manhood. Thank God 
for these good men and great, but say, as 
they have taught us, I also am a man, and 
vow to do your little task, if it be little, 
even as they did their great ones, " in the 
manner of a true man, not for a day, but 
for eternity " ; to live as they counselled and 
commanded, " not commodiously, in the re- 
putable, the plausible, the half, but reso- 
lutely, in the whole, the good, the true." 



Ill 

Emerson and Carlyle 



' 



EMERSON AND CARLYLE 

It has often happened that our writers of 
history, in describing some striking and sig- 
nificant event, have expressed the wish that 
some painter might be moved to reproduce 
it graphically upon his canvas ; and not in- 
frequently they have furnished the painter 
the fullest and most vivid details. I once 
brought together a dozen such passages in 
a magazine paper ; and bread cast upon the 
waters seldom comes back in fewer days, — 
for the painter of one of the new historical 
pictures in the Memorial Hall in our Mas- 
sachusetts State House, whom 1 met during 
his work, drew a worn copy of the paper 
from his pocket, and told me that he owed 
to it the suggestion of his subject and his 
prompting. I wish that I might likewise 
prompt some painter to ponder upon the 
impressive scene in the rooms of the Massa- 
chusetts Historical Society when Emerson, 
on the day of Carlyle's burial, there read his 
final tribute to his friend. I think that few 



158 The Influence of Emerson 

scenes in our literary history have been more 
impressive or significant than that. I wish 
that picture might hang upon the walls of 
the Society's new building, or that it might 
dignify by and by the walls of the new home 
of the Boston Athenaeum, — the Athenaeum 
which Emerson so dearly loved, and upon 
which he pronounced his warm benediction. 
Of this memorable scene it chances also that 
the vivid details have been furnished the 
painter by the historian, — by Dr. Ellis, the 
vice-president, afterwards the president, of 
the Historical Society. 

The reading of this tribute to Carlyle be- 
fore the Massachusetts Historical Society 
was Emerson's last public act, save only one 
lecture at Concord. It was a memorable 
period to a relation as memorable as the 
friendship of Goethe and Schiller in Ger- 
many. It is, indeed, a memorable thing that 
these two men, greatest teachers of truth to 
the England and America of their time, 
should have found each other out so quickly, 
been drawn together so unerringly, and stood 
by each other, through all differences of con- 
ception, aim, and method, so faithfully. 



Emerson and Carlyle 159 

Often as it has been recurred to in these 
days, there is not danger that we shall think 
too much about it. 

Carlyle was an honorary member of the 
Historical Society. Mr. Winthrop, the pres- 
ident, upon hearing of his death, wrote at 
once to Mr. Emerson to insure his attend- 
ance at the commemorative hour which 
had been appointed. It was felt that he was 
the only man who, by the warmest relations 
of personal friendship and the sympathies 
of kindred genius, could fill the demands of 
that occasion. The scene was a memorable 
one, — a scene, writes Dr. Ellis, " never to be 
forgotten by those who felt what a privilege 
they enjoyed in taking the full impression 
of it, with all its vividness and suggestive- 
ness, into heart and thought." It was on 
the day, perhaps the very hour, when Car- 
lyle was being laid to rest in silence, by his 
old friends and the neighbors of his youth, 
in Ecclefechan churchyard. " A small table, 
with two chairs for Mr. Emerson and his 
daughter, was brought into the Dowse libra- 
rary-room, where the meeting was held. The 
manuscript, long since written, but never 



160 The Influence of Emerson 

put in print, was a loose one, and only parts 
of it were to be read by Mr. Emerson. Of 
the incommunicable features of the scene, 
very touching to its witnesses was his gentle 
reference and compliance as he looked to his 
daughter for direction as to the passages to 
be read, and to the connection of them. 
Some slight labial impediments caused an 
occasional halting in the delivery of elon- 
gated words, never favorites with Mr. Emer- 
son. These served, in part, for those delays 
on words which are so familiar to his hearers 
as marking his pauses and emphasis. For 
the rest, he was helped in the initiative 
utterances of them by the silent lips of his 
daughter. The apt and racy significance of 
the most pointed passages came forth in full 
force and with the old incisiveness and 
humor. So hushed was the silence, and so 
intent was the listening, that those who were 
quick of hearing lost nothing of word or in- 
tonation. But even these, the more removed 
in their seats, one by one drew nearer in a 
closing circle around the reader. Their faces 
and inward workings of thought showed the 
profoundness of their interest, as they waited 




Emerson and Carlyle 161 

for the interpretation of the great philoso- 
pher of England by the greatest philosopher 
of America." * 

What Emerson read had been written 
thirty years and more before, written while 
he was staying with Carlyle during his 
London lecturing, in 1848. The thirty 
years with all that they had brought had 
made him wish to alter no word that he 
had ever written of Carlyle. Carlyle had 
lamented and cursed in plenty meantime, 
he had gone up the scale and down it, and 
had left almost nothing free from his knout 
and besom. The dapper men who write 
the tales and the women with " three yearn- 
ings and a hope" made up their minds 
about him ; the stewards of the etiquettes 
and the amiabilities and the craftsmen in 
the literary dainties voted that there was 
no good in him, and that the clown in him 
was devil ; and the men of the silver 

* Dr. Ellis's account was published in Scribner y $ Magazine, May, 
1 88 1, along with Emerson's paper. The latter was also printed in the 
Proceedings of the Historical Society, and is included in Vol. X. of 
Emerson's Works. It was with a reference to this tribute of Emerson 
to Carlyle that Dr. Ellis introduced his own tribute to Emerson before 
the Historical Society the next year. 



1 62 The Influence of Emerson 

spoons, the " gig-men/ ' who never waited 
in Chesterfield's lobby, never knew what 
heartache was or headache or anarchy at 
the pit of the stomach, and never ran the 
risk of discomfiture because never prompted 
to fly their kites high, — these in the days 
after " Reminiscences " fed on the cartoons 
and the caricatures of him, and, like the 
Gaza mob in Dagon's house, laughed 
at his cries, over their reduced claret and 
" Leisure Hour Series," and had a notion 
that his cries were the summing-up of him. 
How petty and pitiful they all are, seen 
from that little upper room above the old 
Puritan graveyard ! and how inconsiderable 
quite their dainty and proper criticisms 
beside this life-long, stanch, and changeless 
friendship of him who truly, as Carlyle 
himself well said, " had not his equal on 
earth for perception,' ' who knew Carlyle 
better than he knew himself, and knew 
him, with all his biliousness and limitations, 
for the giant figure of severe sincerity, in- 
flexible righteousness, and lofty purpose, 
which all the world comes to know him 
for, as his story is all told, as it has gradually 



Emerson and Carlyle 163 

been told, nothing extenuated and naught 
set down in malice ! 

Much has been written upon the remark- 
able personal relations of Carlyle and Em- 
erson, and upon the affinities and striking 
contrasts of their genius. Again and again, 
now that the two lives are rounded, our 
thoughts turn irresistibly to the old theme. 

The last time that Emerson left Concord 
it was to attend the funeral of Longfellow at 
Cambridge, just a month before his own 
death. Fifty years before, almost, in 1835, 
Longfellow, just called to Harvard, went to 
Europe, with a letter of introduction from 
Emerson to Carlyle. Carlyle had just come 
up to London and settled in Cheyne Row. 
It was two years after Emerson had first 
met him among the dreary Craigenputtock 
moors. His coming to Craigenputtock, 
said Carlyle to Longfellow then, was " like 
the visit of an angel/' From that time till 
the end of life the friendship formed so 
highly was highly maintained, and to high 
issues. To no other living writer was 
Emerson drawn so closely as to Carlyle ; 
and Carlyle, among the " narrow built, 



164 The Influence of Emerson 

considerably perverted men " of London, 
wrote, " I hear but one voice, and that 
comes from Concord." "Words cannot 
tell," he said, " how I prize the old friend- 
ship formed there on Craigenputtock Hill, 
or how deeply I have felt in all that 
Emerson has written the same aspiring in- 
telligence which shone about us when he 
came as a young man, and left with us a 
memory always cherished." 

It was in 1833 that Emerson's first visit 
to Carlyle occurred, — the year after his 
withdrawal from the ministry. But he had 
been reading Carlyle already for five years. 
Carlyle's essays were speaking to many 
youthful minds in New England, as Emer- 
son himself said, "with an emphasis that 
hindered them from sleep." It was in 1828 
that Emerson began to read Carlyle's 
articles in the English and Scotch reviews, 
long before he found out that the writer was 
" a Thomas Carlyle." It was just then that 
he wrote the poem, — 

" Good-bye, proud world ! I'm going home," — 
that first clear utterance of his high ideals 



Emerson and Carlyle 165 

and his scorn of sham and show. It was 
natural that at such a time his heart should 
beat in quick response to the sincere and 
ringing words of the author of the Life 
of Schiller and the articles on " German 
Literature " and " Richter." He writes of 
this author, still unknown, in his journal 
in 1832: "I am cheered and instructed 
by this paper on c Corn Law Rhymes/ in 
the Edinburgh, by my Germanic new-light 
writer, whoever he may be. He gives us 
confidence in our principles. He assures 
the truth-lover everywhere of sympathy. 
Blessed art that makes books, and so joins 
me to that stranger by this perfect rail- 
road ! " 

Emerson read "Wilhelm Meister" in 
Carlyle's translation ; and he read the 
"Burns" and " Novalis " and "Voltaire" 
and " Johnson " and " Signs of the Times." 
" Characteristics " appeared just as Emerson 
was breaking his Unitarian fetters. Carlyle, 
too, now writes in his journal, " Have long 
known the Unitarians intus et in cute, and 
never got any good of them, or any ill." A 
wish to see Carlyle had been a factor in de- 



1 66 The Influence of Emerson 

termining Emerson's voyage to Europe just 
after his farewell to his church in 1832. 
He is looking forward to this in Florence, 
where, after meeting Landor, he wrote : " It is 
a mean thing that literary men, philosophers, 
cannot work themselves clear of this ambi- 
tion to appear men of the world, — as if every 
dandy did not understand his business better 
than they. I hope better things of Carlyle, 
who has lashed the same folly." In Rome 
he met a friend of Carlyle, M. Gustave 
d'Eichthal, who gave him a letter of introduc- 
tion to Carlyle. John Stuart Mill, whom 
he met in London, also gave him an intro- 
duction. In Italy his greatest want is that 
he " never meets with men that are great or 
interesting " ; and in Paris he writes in his 
journal : " A man who was no courtier, but 
loved men, went to Rome, and there lived 
with boys. He came to France, and in 
Paris lives alone, and in Paris seldom 
speaks. If he do not see Carlyle in Edin- 
burgh, he may go back to America without 
saying anything in earnest, except to Cranch 
and Landor." At Edinburgh, where he 
preached at the Unitarian chapel and where 



Emerson and Carlyle 167 

he first met Alexander Ireland, he found 
difficulty in discovering Carlyle's wherea- 
bouts, but finally learned from the secretary 
of the university that he was at Craigenput- 
tock, where he had been living for the last 
five years ; and to Craigenputtock Emerson 
drove across the country from Dumfries. 

In August, 1833, Carlyle was more than 
usually despondent among his pigs and pots 
at Craigenputtock ; and the usual despond- 
ency was bad enough. On the 24th of 
August we find him writing in his journal : 
" So now all this racketing and riding has 
ended, and I am left here the solitariest 
stranded, most helpless creature that I have 
been for many years. Months of suffering 
and painful indolence I see before me ; for 
in much I am wrong, and till it is righted, 
or on the way to being so, I cannot help 
myself. . . . The idea of the universe 
struggles dark and painful in me, which 
I must deliver out of me or be wretched." 

"The next entry in the Journal," says 
Mr. Froude, "is in another handwriting. 
It is merely a name — c Ralph Waldo Emer- 
son/ The Carlyles were sitting alone at din- 



1 68 The Influence of Emerson 

ner on a Sunday afternoon at the end of 
August, when a Dumfries carriage drove to 
the door, and there stepped out of it a young 
American, then unknown to fame, but whose 
influence in his own country equals that of 
Carlyle in ours, and whose name stands con- 
nected with his wherever the English lan- 
guage is spoken. He had read Carlyle's 
articles and had discerned with the instinct 
of genius that here was a voice speaking real 
and fiery convictions, and no longer echoes 
and conventionalisms. He had come to 
Europe to study its social and spiritual 
phenomena ; and to the young Emerson, as 
to the old Goethe, the most important of 
them appeared to be Carlyle." 

Of this famous first visit of Emerson to 
Carlyle we have accounts from both parties ; 
and Emerson's account is doubly valuable, 
since it is the only sketch we have of Carlyle's 
life at Craigenputtock as it was seen by others. 
We have indeed two accounts of the visit 
from Emerson, — besides the well-known 
passage in cc English Traits," the interesting 
letter to Mr. Ireland. The passage in " Eng- 
lish Traits," with its pictures of Carlyle's tall, 



Emerson and Carlyle 169 

gaunt form and cliff-like brow, his northern 
accent and anecdote and humor, the loveli- 
ness of Craigenputtock, the talk of pigs and 
pauperism, the satirical views of literature, is 
too familiar to need much quoting again. 
" We went out to walk over long hills, and 
looked at Criffel, then without his cap, and 
down into Wordsworth's country. There 
we sat down and talked of the immortality 
of the soul. It was not Carlyle's fault that 
we talked on that topic, for he has the nat- 
ural disinclination of every nimble spirit to 
bruise itself against walls, and did not like to 
place himself where no step can be taken. 
But he was honest and true, and cognizant 
of the subtle links that bind ages together, 
and saw how every event affects all the future. 
c Christ died on the tree : that built Dunscore 
kirk yonder ; that brought you and me 
together.' " 

" I spent near twenty-four hours with 
him," Emerson writes to Mr. Ireland. 
"He lives with his wife, a most agreeable 
and accomplished woman, in perfect solitude. 
There is not a person to speak to within 
seven miles. He is the most simple, frank, 



170 The Influence of Emerson 

amiable person. I became acquainted with 
him at once ; we walked over several miles 
of hills and talked upon all the great ques- 
tions which interest us most. The comfort 
of meeting a man of genius is that he speaks 
sincerely, that he feels himself to be so rich 
that he is above the meanness of pretending 
to knowledge which he has not; and Car- 
lyle does not pretend to have solved the 
great problems, but rather to be an observer 
of their solution as it goes forward in the 
world. I asked him at what religious de- 
velopment the concluding passage in his 
piece in the Edinburgh Review, upon German 
literature, and some passages in the piece 
called c Characteristics/ pointed. He re- 
plied that he was not competent to state it 
even to himself; he wanted rather to see. 
My own feeling was that I had met with 
men of far less power who had yet greater 
insight into religious truth. He is, as you 
might guess from his papers, the most catho- 
lic of philosophers ; he forgives and loves 
everybody, and wishes each to struggle on 
in his own place and arrive at his own ends. 
But his respect for eminent men, or rather 



Emerson and Carlyle 171 

his scale of eminence, is rather the reverse 
of the popular scale. Scott, Mackintosh, 
Jeffrey, Gibbon — even Bacon — are no 
heroes of his. Stranger yet, he hardly ad- 
mires Socrates, the glory of the Greek 
world ; but Burns and Samuel Johnson. 
Mirabeau, he said, interested him ; and I 
suppose whoever else has given himself 
with all his heart to a leading instinct, and 
has not calculated too much. . . . He talks 
finely, seems to love the broad Scotch, and 
I loved him very much at once. I am afraid 
he finds his entire solitude tedious ; but I 
could not help congratulating him upon 
his treasure in his wife, and I hope they 
will not leave the moors, 'tis so much better 
for a man of letters to nurse himself in se- 
clusion than to be filed down to the com- 
mon level by the compliances and imitations 
of city society." 

Still another word of Emerson's we get 
concerning Carlyle at this time, — a word in 
his journal a day or two after the visit : " I 
never saw more amiableness than is in his 
countenance. T. C. has made up his mind 
to pay his taxes to William and Adelaide 



172 The Influence of Emerson 

Guelf, with great cheerfulness, as long as 
William is able to compel the payment, 
and shall cease to do so the moment he 
ceases to compel them. T. C. prefers Lon- 
don to any other place to live in. John S. 
Mill the best mind he knows : more purity, 
more force ; has worked himself clear from 
Benthamism. His only companion to speak 
to was the minister of Dunscore kirk. 
And he used to go sometimes to the kirk, 
and envy the poor parishioners their good 
faith. But he seldom went, and the min- 
ister had grown suspicious of them and did 
not come to see them." Waiting through 
tedious, stormy days at Liverpool for his 
ship to sail, he sighed for Carlyle : " Ah me, 
Mr. Thomas Carlyle, I would give a gold 
pound for your wise company this gloomy 
evening." He writes about Carlyle during 
the voyage, in that wonderful confession of 
his own religious thought and feeling. 
Soon after his arrival home he wrote to 
James Freeman Clarke, then in Louisville, 
who in a note had asked him concerning 
Carlyle : cc My recollections of him are most 
pleasant, and I feel great confidence in his 



Emerson and Carlyle 173 

character. He understands and recognizes 
his mission. He is perfectly simple and 
affectionate in his manner, and frank, as he 
can well afford to be, in his communications. 
He expressed some impatience of his total 
solitude, and talked of Paris as a residence. 
I told him I hoped not; for I should al- 
ways remember him with respect, meditating 
in the mountains of Nithsdale. He was 
cheered, as he ought to be, by learning 
that his papers were read with interest by 
young men unknown to him in this conti- 
nent ; and when I specified a piece which 
had attracted warm commendation from the 
New Jerusalem people here, his wife said 
that is always the way ; whatever he has 
writ that he thinks has fallen dead, he hears 
of two or three years afterward. He has 
many, many tokens of Goethe's regard, 
miniatures, medals, and many letters. . . . 
He told me he had a book which he 
thought to publish, but was in the pur- 
pose of dividing into a series of articles' 
for c Fraser's Magazine/ I therefore sub- 
scribed for that book, which he calls the 
' Mud Magazine.' " 



174 The Influence of Emerson 

Emerson stayed over night, and went 
to Dumfries in the morning. Two days 
later Carlyle writes an account of the visit 
to his mother. " Our third happiness," 
he says, telling of three happinesses that 
had befallen them at Craigenputtock, "was 
the arrival of a certain young unknown 
friend, named Emerson, from Boston, in 
the United States, who turned aside so far 
from his British, French and Italian travels 
to see me here ! He had an introduction 
from Mill and a Frenchman (Baron d'Eich- 
thal's nephew) whom John knew at Rome. 
Of course we could do no other than wel- 
come him, the rather as he seemed to be 
one of the most lovable creatures in him- 
self we had ever looked on. He stayed till 
next day with us, and talked and heard talk 
to his heart's content ; and left us all really 
sad to part with him. Jane says it is the first 
journey since Noah's Deluge undertaken to 
Craigenputtock for such a purpose." 

Carlyle recurs to this visit again and again. 
It had been to him a red-letter day. He 
speaks of it to the Americans who come to 
Cheyne Row, as the time "when that super- 



Emerson and Carlyle 175 

nal vision, Waldo Emerson, dawned on 
me." a Of you," wrote Margaret Fuller to 
Emerson, in 1846, telling of her visit to 
Carlyle, " he spoke with hearty kindness ; 
and he told, with beautiful feeling, a story 
of some poor farmer, or artisan, in the coun- 
try, who on Sunday lays aside the cark and 
care of that dirty English world and sits 
reading the Essays and looking upon the 
sea." To Lord Houghton he said : " That 
man came to see me, I don't know what 
brought him,, and we kept him one night, 
and then he left us. I saw him go up the 
hill ; I didn't go with him to see him de- 
scend. I preferred to watch him mount and 
vanish like an angel." In the same spirit 
Mrs. Carlyle writes to Emerson : " Friend, 
who years ago, in the Desert, descended on 
us, out of the clouds as it were, and made 
one day there look like enchantment for us, 
and left me weeping that it was only one 
day." Carlyle dwells fondly upon it the 
evening after his address as Lord Rector of 
Edinburgh, when his heart was mellowed 
and he lived his life over ; and it finds a 
place also in his " Reminiscences " : " The 



176 The Influence of Emerson 

visit of Emerson from Concord, and our 
quiet night of clear fine talk, was also very 
pretty to both of us." 

Emerson, rejoicing in his own escape from 
the " weary crowd " and " learned clan " of 
Boston to the quiet fields and lanes of Con- 
cord, where man could meet with God in 
the bush, hoped that Carlyle would not 
leave the moors. But already, as Emerson 
himself noted, Carlyle's eyes were turning 
toward London. " Sartor Resartus " was 
already written and lying in Fraser's drawer ; 
and when Longfellow, two years later, went 
to England, carrying Emerson's letter, Car- 
lyle had been living in London a year, and 
u Sartor " had all been given piecemeal to the 
world. Not to a very large world. When 
it began to appear, no Englishman could tell 
what to make of it. The writer was consid- 
ered a maniac, and the unlucky editor began 
to dread the ruin of his magazine. " c Teu- 
felsdrockh ' beyond measure unpopular ; an 
oldest subscriber came in to him and said, 
c If there is any more of that d — d stuff I 
will/ etc., etc. ; on the other hand, an order 
from America to send a copy of the magazine 



Emerson and Carlyle 177 

so long as there was anything of Carlyle's 
in it." The almost utter lack of apprecia- 
tion in London soon flung Carlyle back into 
a despondency greater, if possible, than any 
ever revealed by the journal at Craigenput- 
tock. <f My state has been one of those it 
was almost frightful to speak of," is the first 
entry in his journal at Cheyne Row, scarcely 
a month after the settlement there. " Mood 
tragical, gloomy, as of one forsaken, who had 
nothing left him but to get through his task 
and die. Despicablest fears of coming to 
absolute beggary, etc." " In the midst of 
innumerable discouragements," he adds, " let 
me mention two small circumstances that are 
comfortable. The first is a letter from 
some nameless Irishman in Cork (Fraser 
read it to me) actually containing a true 
and one of the friendliest possible recogni- 
tions. . . . The second is a letter I got 
to-day from Emerson, of Boston in America ; 
sincere, not baseless, of most exaggerated 
estimation. Precious is man to man." 

The correspondence between Carlyle and 
Emerson, which fills so important a place in 
the lives of the two men, was now well 



ijS The Influence of Emerson 

begun. The first letter in this famous 
correspondence was written by Emerson, 
May 14, 1834; the last by Carlyle, April 
a, 1872. Of this correspondence Whipple 
justly says: "In richness and fulness of 
matter, there is nothing superior, nothing, 
one is prompted to say, equal to it in 
literary annals." Nowhere else are the 
deep sympathies and sharp differences of the 
writers so strikingly revealed. Dr. Holmes 
estimates it well : " The hatred of unreality 
was uppermost with Carlyle ; the love of 
what is real and genuine with Emerson. 
Those old moralists, the weeping and the 
laughing philosophers, find their counter- 
parts in every thinking community. Car- 
lyle did not weep, but he scolded ; Emerson 
did not laugh, but in his gravest moments 
there was a smile waiting for the cloud to 
pass from his forehead. The Duet they 
chanted was a Miserere with a Te Deum for 
its Antiphon ; a Be Profundis answered by a 
Sursum Cor da. c The ground of my ex- 
istence is black as death/ says Carlyle. 
c Come and live with me a year,' says 
Emerson, c and if you do not like New 



Emerson and Carlyle 179 

England well enough to stay, one of these 
years (when the "History " has passed its 
ten editions, and been translated into as many 
languages) I will come and dwell with you.' ' 
The criticisms of each other's style are most 
frank. In his first letter, Emerson remon- 
strates with Carlyle upon his "defying dic- 
tion " ; and he writes in his diary, " O, 
Carlyle ! the merit of glass is not to be 
seen, but to be seen through." Carlyle 
finds that Emerson's sentences do not 
"cohere," do not "rightly stick to their 
foregoers and their followers ; the para- 
graphs not as a beaten ingot, but as a 
beautiful bag of duck shot held together by 
canvas." In his diary Emerson writes : 
" My affection for that man really incapa- 
citates me from reading his book. The 
pages which to others look so rich and 
alluring to me have a frigid and marrowless 
air for the warm hand and heart I have an 
estate in, and the living eye of which I can 
almost discern across the sea some sparkles." 
In 1836 Emerson edited "Sartor Re- 
sartus," from the pages of Fraser, and had 
it published in Boston, himself writing a 



180 The Influence of Emerson 

preface for the book. He had lent the 
numbers of Fraser to Miss Jackson at 
Plymouth, and we have accounts of the 
excitement which they caused in her circle 
and in others. " The foreign dress and 
aspect of the work," Emerson said in his 
preface, cc are quite superficial, and cover a 
genuine Saxon heart. We believe no book 
has been published for many years written 
in a more sincere style of idiomatic English, 
or which discovers an equal mastery over all 
the riches of language. The author makes 
ample amends for the occasional eccentricity 
of his genius, not only by frequent bursts 
of pure splendor, but by the wit and sense 
which never fail him." He has c< an insight 
into the manifold wants and tendencies of 
human nature, which is very rare among our 
popular authors. The philosophy and the 
purity of moral sentiment which inspire the 
work will find their way to the heart of 
every lover of virtue." 

Emerson received £^S° from the sale 
of this American edition of " Sartor Re- 
sartus," — a sum which must have been wel- 
come enough in Cheyne Row, considering 



Emerson and Carlyle 181 

the rather low ebb of the housekeeping 
there at the time. This was before " Sartor " 
had been published at all in book form in 
England, and while there were probably not 
a dozen persons between Whitechapel and 
Chelsea who thought it anything else than a 
mass of extravagances and absurdities. Car- 
lyle, having occasion at this time to make 
an extract from " Sartor," said parentheti- 
cally, " I quote from a New England book." 
The interest in Carlyle was for long much 
greater in America than in England ; and 
not a few of Emerson's letters enclose drafts 
for copyright. " The French Revolution " 
found its adequate recognition in Boston 
long before it found it in London. 

In 1838 Emerson collected Carlyle's 
essays and miscellaneous writings, from the 
pages of the English reviews, and published 
them in three volumes, with an introduc- 
tion ; and this was done also before the 
essays were put into a book in England. 
All of the zealous New England Tran- 
scendentalists in that time were close readers 
of Carlyle ; many of them owed to him 
their principal knowledge of German liter- 



1 82 The Influence of Emerson 

ature; most of them were profoundly af- 
fected by him. Carlyle loved the Dial — 
" yet with a kind of shudder." Years be- 
fore the Dial was started, there had been 
talk of another journal, with Carlyle as its 
editor. Emerson especially wished that he 
might come to New England. " Shall we 
not bid him come," he writes to James 
Freeman Clarke in 1834, "and be Poet and 
Teacher to a most scattered flock wanting a 
shepherd ? " 

" Past and Present " was published during 
the brief existence of the Dial. Emerson 
edited it for America, and wrote about it in 
the Dial, pronouncing it a political tract 
with which we have nothing to compare 
since Milton and Burke. " It is such an 
appeal to the conscience and honor of Eng- 
land as cannot be forgotten. . . . When the 
political aspects are so calamitous that the 
sympathies of the man overpower the habits 
of the poet, a higher than literary inspiration 
may succor him. It is a costly proof of 
character, that the most renowned scholar of 
England should take his reputation in his 
hand and should descend into the ring ; and 



Emerson and Carlyle 183 

he has added to his love whatever honor his 
opinions may forfeit. To atone for this 
departure from the vows of the scholar and 
his eternal duties, to this secular charity, we 
have at least this gain, that here is a message 
which those to whom it was addressed can- 
not choose but hear." Emerson declares 
Carlyle to be " the first domestication of the 
modern system with its infinity of details 
into style," — all the vast and multifarious 
movements of our present civilization best 
represented in him. For " London and 
Europe tunnelled, graded, corn-lawed, with 
trade-nobility, and East and West Indies for 
dependencies, and America with the Rocky 
Hills in the horizon, have never before been 
conquered in literature." Of the faults of 
the book Emerson says: "It appears to us 
as a certain disproportion in the picture, 
caused by the obtrusion of the whims of the 
painter. In this work, as in his former 
labors, Mr. Carlyle reminds us of a sick 
giant. His humors are expressed with so 
much force of constitution that his fancies 
are more attractive and more credible than 
the sanity of duller men. But the habitual 



184 The Influence of Emerson 

exaggeration of the tone wearies while it 
stimulates. It is felt to be so much deduc- 
tion from the universality of the picture. 
It is not serene sunshine, but everything 
is seen in lurid storm-lights. Every object 
attitudinizes to the very mountains, and stars 
almost, under the refractions of this wonder- 
ful humorist; and, instead of the common 
earth and sky, we have a Martin's Creation 
or Judgment Day." 

The editing of " Sartor Resartus " and 
Carlyle's Essays may be regarded as the 
beginning of Emerson's own literary career. 
He doubtless looked upon the introduction 
of Carlyle to America as the best thing that 
a literary man could do at that time. " If 
the good Heaven have any word to impart 
to this unworthy generation," he wrote, 
" here is one scribe qualified and clothed for 
its occasion." Emerson published nothing 
himself during his days in the ministry, and 
seems to have written nothing on literary 
themes. " Nature" did not appear till 
1836 ; and it was not until after the publica- 
tion of " Sartor " that the oration on the 
" American Scholar " came and the epoch- 



Emerson and Carlyle 185 

making address to the Harvard Divinity 
School, — the first clear revelations to Bos- 
ton and Cambridge of the nature of the 
new light which was rising. The Harvard 
address was written at the very time that he 
was editing Carlyle's Essays, and we may 
imagine that he refreshed himself in the 
writing by spells of recourse to " Signs of 
the Times " and " Characteristics." 

Emerson's oration on the "American 
Scholar" filled Carlyle with delight, as he 
had already been delighted with " Nature," 
which he had lent about to all his acquaint- 
ance that " had a sense for such things." 
He justly anticipated the verdict of the years 
when he wrote to Emerson, " I call it The 
Foundation and Ground-plan on which you 
may build whatsoever of great and true has 
been given you to build." 

We now find Carlyle, on his side, intro- 
ducing Emerson to England. Emerson's 
first little volume of Essays was published 
in 1 841 ; and the same year Carlyle had 
it reprinted in England, with a preface by 
himself, — a preface so memorable, so char- 
acteristic of Carlyle, so justly appreciative 



1 86 The Influence of Emerson 

of Emerson and so unfamiliar, it is to be 
feared, to most American readers to-day, 
that a few passages from it may profitably 
be cited here : * — 

"The name of Ralph Waldo Emerson 
is not entirely new to England ; distin- 
guished travellers bring us tidings of such a 
man ; fractions of his writings have found 
their way into the hands of the curious here ; 
fitful hints that there is in New England 
some spiritual notability called Emerson 
glide through reviews and magazines. . . . 
Emerson's writings and speakings amount 
to something ; and yet hitherto, as it seems 
to me, this Emerson is far less notable for 
what he has spoken or done than for the 
many things he has not spoken and has for- 
borne to do. With uncommon interest I 
have learned that this, and in such a never- 
resting, locomotive country too, is one of 
those rare men who have withal the invalu- 
able talent of sitting still. That an educated 
man of good gifts and opportunities, after 
looking at the public arena and even trying 

* The whole is given in Mr. George Willis Cooke's volume on 
Emerson, that invaluable repository of so much about Emerson not 
otherwise easily accessible. 



Emerson and Carlyle 187 

— not with ill success — what its tasks and 
its prizes might amount to, should retire for 
long years into rustic obscurity and, amid 
the all-pervading jingle of dollars and loud 
chaffering of ambitions and promotions, 
should quietly, with cheerful deliberateness, 
sit down to spend his life, not in Mammon- 
worship or the hunt for reputation, influ- 
ence, place or any outward advantage what- 
soever ; this, when we get note of it, is a 
thing really worth noting. For myself, I 
have looked over with no common feeling 
to this brave Emerson, seated by his rustic 
hearth on the other side of the ocean (yet 
not altogether parted from me either), silently 
communing with his own soul and with the 
God's World it finds itself alive in yonder. 
Pleasures of Virtue, Progress of the Species, 
Black Emancipation, New Tariff, Eclecti- 
cism, Locofocoism, Ghost of Improved 
Socinianism, these, with many other ghosts 
and substances, are squeaking, jabbering, 
according to their capabilities, round this 
man. To one man among the sixteen 
millions their jabber is all unmusical. The 
silent voices of the stars above and of the 



1 88 The Influence of Emerson 

green earth beneath are profitable to him, — 
tell him gradually that these others are but 
ghosts, which will shortly have to vanish; 
that the Life-Fountain these proceed out 
of does not vanish. The words of such 
a man — what words he finds good to speak 
— are worth attending to." 

This from Carlyle, who at the same time 
was writing to Sterling, " Emerson seems 
to me like a kind of New Era," while most 
proper New England people looked upon 
Emerson as little less beside himself than 
the Londoners had thought the author of 
" Sartor Resartus," * and while the greater 
part of the five hundred copies of" Nature," 
which were all that the bookseller ventured 
to print, still lay on the bookseller's shelves, 
destined to be well represented there for ten 
years to come. The critics found the " Es- 
says " more devoid of real meaning than 
anything which often came into their hands. 
One, of Princeton, thought that such essays 

*"The majority of the sensible, practical community regarded 
him as mystical, as crazy or affected, as an imitator of Carlyle, as racked 
and revolutionary, as a fool, as one who did not himself know what he 
meant." — James Freeman Clarke, Lecture on the Religious Philosophy 
of Emerson. 



Emerson and Carlyle 189 

could be produced during a lifetime, as rap- 
idly as a human pen could be made to move. 
Harvard College, at the hands of one pro- 
fessor, found the Essays full of " extrava- 
gance, overweening self-confidence, ancient 
errors, and misty rhetoric," and at the hands 
of another found his "professed poetry" the 
" most prosaic and unintelligible stuff." 
Sound Unitarianism hastened to repudiate 
the address before the Divinity School as 
the " lucubrations of an individual who had 
no connection with the school whatever," 
and notions "utterly distasteful to Unitarian 
ministers generally, by whom they were 
esteemed neither good divinity nor good 
sense." Only Dr. Channing told Mr. Ware 
and Mr. Norton that they were fighting 
shadows, and that Emerson's God was 
"alive and not dead" ; and Theodore 
Parker, whose true life was now beginning, 
said that it was Emerson who fed his lamp. 
It was not Carlyle alone who measured the 
new man aright, nor in Old England only 
that the prophet was received. But, steadily 
as Emerson's reputation grew at home, it 
grew even more rapidly in England, — just 



190 The Influence of Emerson 

as the recognition of Carlyle was quicker 
here than there. As to Carlyle's intellectual 
influence upon Emerson himself, an English 
critic has justly said, " It would be hard to 
lay the finger on a passage in Emerson 
which he could not conceivably have come 
by if Carlyle had never lived." Yet another 
English scholar has said equally justly, 
" Carlyle's frank recognition of him as a 
spiritual and intellectual equal must have 
had a most stimulating effect on him." 
It was very largely owing to Carlyle's intro- 
duction and hearty indorsement that Emer- 
son's Essays were at once so widely read 
in England and that his fame as a lecturer 
became so great as to lead to the invitation 
from the Mechanics' Institutes for the 
courses of lectures in England. He went 
to England in October, 1847, simply writ- 
ing to Carlyle that he intended to sail 
" about the first of October." " Contrive 
in some sure way," wrote Carlyle to Mr/ 
Ireland in Manchester, " that Emerson may 
get hold of my note the instant he lands in 
England. I shall be permanently grieved 
otherwise. And, on the whole, if you can, 



Emerson and Carlyle 191 

get him put safe into the express train, and 
shot up hither, as the first road he goes." 
This invitation, Emerson wrote his wife, 
" I could no more resist than I could gravi- 
tation" ; and he hastened to London. "At 
ten at night the door was opened to me by 
Jane Carlyle, and the man himself was 
behind her with a lamp in the entry. They 
were very little changed from their old 
selves of fourteen years ago, when I left 
them at Craigenputtock. c Well/ said Car- 
lyle, c here we are, shovelled together again/ 
The floodgates of his talk are quickly 
opened, and the river is a great and constant 
stream. We had large communication that 
night until nearly one o'clock, and at break- 
fast next morning it began again." Then 
came many great walks about London, 
" Carlyle melting all Westminster and Lon- 
don down with his talk and laughter as 
he walked ; " and, mixed with the many 
lectures and the much society, happy 
evenings and mornings by the fireside. 
" Carlyle and his wife live on beautiful terms. 
Nothing can be more engaging than their 
ways, and in her bookcase all his books are 



192 The Influence of Emerson 

inscribed to her, as they come, from year to 
year, each with some significant lines." 

Yet, as the weeks of Emerson's English 
lecturing went on, it is clear that the sharp 
differences in temperament and in opinion 
between the two men made themselves 
seriously felt. Carlyle writes to a friend 
early in Emerson's visit : cc We had immense 
talking with him here, but found he did not 
give us much to chew the cud upon, — found, 
in fact, that he came with the rake rather 
than the shovel. He is a pure, high-minded 
man ; but I think his talent is not quite 
so high as I had anticipated." He found 
Emerson's doctrines cc too airy and thin." 
A little later he writes in his diary concern- 
ing Emerson: " Very exotic — differed much 
from me, as a gymnosophist sitting idle on 
a flowery bank may do from a wearied 
worker and wrestler passing that way with 
many of his bones broken." When finally 
Emerson returned home, Carlyle, recording 
the fact that he " parted with him in peace," 
and paying another tender tribute to him for 
his great friendliness to himself, comments : 
" A spiritual son of mine ? Yes, in a good 



Emerson and Carlyle 193 

degree, but gone into philanthropy and other 
moonshine." " Carlyle, at this time/' as 
Cabot says, "was in a mood in which Emer- 
son's optimism was apt to call forth c showers 
of vitriol ' upon all men and things. They 
did not meet often nor with much pleasure 
on either side ; but their regard and affection 
for each other were unabated." Earlier in 
his biography of Emerson, speaking gener- 
ally of the two men's characteristics, in his 
account of the beginning of their friend- 
ship, Cabot says, not with entire truth, but 
emphasizing the point which now affected 
them : " Neither cared much for the other's 
ideas ; to each, indeed, the leading idea of 
the other, the message he wished to bear to 
his generation, was a delusion. Had they 
been required respectively to define by a 
single trait the farthest reach of folly in 
a theory of conduct, Carlyle would have 
selected the notion that mankind need only 
to be set free and led to think and act 
for themselves, and Emerson the doctrine 
that they need only to be well governed." 
These differences were accentuated to the 
highest degree at the time of Emerson's 



194 The Influence of Emerson 

visit to London in 1847. Carlyle was sur- 
charged with Cromwell ; Emerson was hos- 
pitably entertaining the doctrine of non- 
resistance in its extremest form, and even 
venturing opinions which, fathered to-day 
by Kropotkin and his friends, would be 
called rank anarchy. Espinasse, summing 
up the talk at Carlyle's, declares that " Em- 
erson's theory was that the wise man should 
have such perfect confidence in the on-goings 
of the universe, the development of the 
human race included, as to refrain from 
fighting with pen or tongue, not less than 
with sword, for the good and against the 
bad, and should regard even the best gov- 
ernment and legislation as superfluous inter- 
ferences with the ordained economy of 
things. " It was of this visit to England, 
it will be remembered, that " English Traits " 
was born. The chapter on Stonehenge is 
an account of Emerson's visit to the fa- 
mous ruin in company with Carlyle, and con- 
tains the record of significant conversation ; 
but, although Emerson tells us here that he 
" opened the dogma of no-government and 
non-resistance " and said sweeping things 



Emerson and Carlyle 195 

about " the bankruptcy of the vulgar mus- 
ket-worship/ ' it is clear that the record is 
incomplete. Espinasse tells us that after 
this trip to Stonehenge Carlyle was full 
of indignant protest at Emerson's limitless 
laissez-faire, which, he said, would prevent 
a man from " rooting out a thistle." Caro- 
line Fox says that Carlyle tried to shake 
Emerson's optimism by taking him the 
round of the horrors and abominations of 
London, asking after each exhibition, " Do 
you believe in the devil now ? " When 
Emerson at the Cheyne Row fireside em- 
phasized his belief that man everywhere, in 
whatever sin or degradation, was always 
tending upwards, Mrs. Carlyle's indignation, 
Espinasse tells us, "knew no bounds, and 
for some time she could scarcely speak of 
Emerson with patience." Espinasse would 
make us believe that the friction with Mrs. 
Carlyle was rather serious, saying, " Emer- 
son's admiration for her abated visibly, till 
at last he was heard to say that the society 
of c the lady ' was worth cultivating mainly 
because she was the person who could tell 
you most about the husband." All these 



196 The Influence of Emerson 

things are to be taken for what they are 
worth ; and they are not worth very much. 
They witness to the great personal and 
philosophical differences between Emerson 
and Carlyle ; but their mutual admiration 
and affection went on after the conversa- 
tions just the same as before them. In 
the Stonehenge chapter itself, Emerson 
pays special tribute to Carlyle's genius, pen- 
etration, and severe theory of duty; and 
Carlyle writes to Emerson soon after his 
return to America, " Though I see well 
enough what a great deep cleft divides us, 
in our ways of practically looking at the 
world, I see also (as probably you do your- 
self) where are the rock-strata, miles deep, 
united again, and the two poor souls are 
at one." 

The Life of Cromwell had been pub- 
lished shortly before this time of Emerson's 
lecturing in England, and Carlyle was now 
beginning his preparations for the intermin- 
able " Frederick." Now and then, as this 
work went on, a letter came from Emerson ; 
" and, amid all the smoke and mist of this 
world," said Carlyle, " it is always as a 



Emerson and Carlyle 197 

window flung open to the azure. During 
all this last weary work of mine, his 
words have been nearly the only ones 
about the thing done to which I have in- 
wardly responded." It was a weary work 
indeed for Carlyle ; and, when at last it was 
completed, he wrote to Emerson to express 
the sorrowful conviction that the years spent 
on it had been wasted, as the more he had 
to do with Frederick the less heroic he 
found him. This may have been extrava- 
gant, — it was the expression of an exhausted 
and despondent time ; but certain it is that 
the effect of his long years upon the " Fred- 
erick " was not wholesome for Carlyle ; and 
perhaps it was this absorption in Prussian 
absolutism as much as anything else which 
betrayed him into the positions which he 
took at the beginning of our Civil War, and 
which he defended with a coarseness so 
brutal, — for it must be said, — which Amer- 
icans found it so hard to forgive. The 
bitter feelings against him which came to 
his ears from America were very painful to 
Carlyle. " They think," he cried sharply 
to an American friend, " some of you think, 



198 The Influence of Emerson 

I am no friend to America. But I love 
America, the true America, the country of 
Emerson and Emerson's friends, the country 
of honest toilers and brave thinkers." It 
was Emerson who dealt the final, stagger- 
ing blow which awakened Carlyle from his 
false dream of the conditions of society in 
the Southern States ; for, though he awak- 
ened slowly, he did awake at last. "It was 
early in October, 1864," says Mr. Conway, 
" that I found him reading and rereading a 
letter from Emerson. " The "voice from 
Concord " had come to him now freighted 
with tenderness indeed, but also with terrible 
truth. The letter spoke of old friendship, 
mentioned pleasantly a friend whom Carlyle 
had introduced, and spoke of the satisfaction 
with which he had read the fourth volume 
of the " Frederick," especially the evidence 
it gave that many years had not yet broken 
any fibre of Carlyle's force, — " a pure joy to 
me, who abhor the inroads which time makes 
in me and my friends. To live too long 
is the capital misfortune." Then, says Mr. 
Conway, Emerson's sentences turned to 
fire, — fire in which love was quick as enthu- 



Emerson and Carlyle 199 

siasm was burning. He said he had lately 
lamented that Carlyle had not visited 
America. It would have made it impossible 
that his name should ever be cited against 
the side of humanity, and would have shown 
him the necessities and aspirations struggling 
up in the free states, though but unsteadily 
articulated there. " The battle of humanity 
is at this hour in America/' He longed to 
enlist him with his thunderbolt on the right 
side. Could not the thoughtful minds of 
England see the finger-pointings of the gods 
which, above the understanding, feed the 
hopes and guide the wills of men ? As for 
Carlyle himself, there must be some mistake. 
Perhaps he was experimenting on idlers. 
But he could not be disguised from those 
eyes that saw deep. They knew him better 
than he knew himself, perhaps, certainly 
better than others knew him. And so 
Carlyle felt when he read in this letter, at 
the close, " Keep the old kindness, which I 
prize above words." 

" No danger but that will be kept," said 
Carlyle. " For the rest, this letter, the first 
I have received from Emerson this long 



2oo The Influence of Emerson 

time, fills me with astonishment. That the 
clearest mind now living — for I don't 
know Emerson's equal on earth for percep- 
tion — should write so is quasi-miraculous. 
I have tried to look into the middle of 
things in America, and I have seen a people 
cutting throats indefinitely to put the negro 
into a position for which all experience 
shows him unfit." 

Emerson's letter now came as the voice 
of Carlyle's good angel. "Never again," 
says Mr. Conway, cc did I hear Carlyle 
speak as before concerning the issue in 
America." His esteem for America and 
Americans steadily grew, and his eyes 
seemed again turning with hope to the 
West. 

In the Concord household the affection 
for Carlyle and the pre-eminent interest in 
him had never wavered. We get many 
glimpses of them. One interesting glimpse 
is that, in one of the years soon after 
Emerson's London lecturing, which John 
Albee gives us. The talk had turned to 
Carlyle, and Emerson produced Carlyle's 
photograph, with the heavy lower jaw and 



Emerson and Carlyle 201 

lip, " between which as between millstones,' ' 
he said with loving admiration, " every 
humbug was sure to be pulverized." " And 
then," says Albee, " he good-naturedly imi- 
tated Carlyle for me ; he was an excellent 
mimic." Soon after the war Carlyle con- 
ceived the thought of presenting to New 
England the books which he had collected 
and used in the preparation of his " Crom- 
well " and "Frederick the Great," — "of 
testifying," he wrote, " my gratitude to New 
England — New England acting mainly 
through one of her sons called Waldo 
Emerson." There was correspondence be- 
tween the two, the relative claims of the 
Boston Public Library and the Harvard 
Library were considered, and finally it was 
settled by Emerson's judgment that all 
should go together to Harvard, where to-day 
they constitute one of the university's sa- 
cred treasures. Emerson wrote that he 
should add the copy of Wood's " Athenae 
Oxonienses," given him by Carlyle in 1848, 
"in which every pen and pencil mark of 
yours is notable," — as may also be said con- 
cerning the Cromwell books. 



202 The Influence of Emerson 

Niagara had been safely shot by us, 
"nigger question" and all, the prodigal 
Southern States had been taken home 
again, and the Geneva tribunal had duly 
assessed John Bull for his bad manners, 
when Emerson, in October, 1872, set out 
for his last visit to Europe. In London he 
found new delight in his friendship for 
Carlyle. " I found my way to Chelsea," he 
writes his wife, "and spent two or three 
hours with Carlyle in his study. He 
opened his arms and embraced me, after 
seriously gazing for a time : c I am glad to 
see you once more in the flesh/ — and we sat 
down and had a steady outpouring for two 
hours and more." Carlyle wrote concern- 
ing it, " It's a very striking and curious 
spectacle to behold a man in these days 
so confidently cheerful as Emerson." Mrs. 
Carlyle was now dead, and Carlyle had en- 
tered into the evening twilight, — " so aged- 
looking," Emerson found ; but Emerson's 
visit was made a festival by his old English 
friends. "There is no other American," 
wrote one, "who has in England a company 
of such friends as those who gather about 



Emerson and Carlyle 203 

Mr. Emerson ; no one for whom so many 
rare men and women have a reverence so 
affectionate ; no one who holds to the best 
section of English students and of her most 
religious and cultivated minds a relation 
so delightful to both." This interest was 
shown in the organization in England, in 
1869, of an association, which Emerson 
found in full life on this last visit, devoted 
to the publication and diffusion of the works 
of Carlyle and Emerson, — its kindred ob- 
jects, the diffusion of education, the ele- 
vation of woman, international peace, the 
broadening of religion, and the general 
diffusion of art and culture. 

Emerson returned to America in 1873. 
It was just forty years from the time when, 
a young man of thirty, he had first found 
Carlyle on the Craigenputtock moors. Mill, 
who had introduced him to Carlyle, died in 
the same month (May, 1873) tnat Emerson 
now left Carlyle for the last time. Cole- 
ridge, Wordsworth, Landor, Clough, Leigh 
Hunt, Dickens, Faraday, Thackeray, Ma- 
caulay, Arnold, Mrs. Somerville, and others, 
whom he had met during his previous visits 



204 The Influence of Emerson 

to England, were dead. Channing and 
Parker, Margaret Fuller and Francis, among 
the old Transcendentalists and reformers, 
were dead. Sumner and Garrison, Ripley 
and Brownson, Dwight and Cranch, Cabot, 
W. H. Channing, Hedge, Bartol, Clarke, 
Furness, and Miss Peabody still lived, al- 
though so many of them were destined to 
precede Emerson to the undiscovered coun- 
try. Hawthorne and Thoreau were dead. 
Alcott alone remained his neighbor, out of 
the once bright Concord constellation. Car- 
lyle was now almost eighty, and his working 
life was done. Emerson's work too was al- 
most over. In 1874 he was put in nomina- 
nation by the independent party among the 
students of Glasgow University for the office 
of Lord Rector, and received five hundred 
votes against seven hundred for Disraeli, who 
was elected. " I count that vote," Emerson 
wrote to Dr. Hutchison Stirling, " as quite 
the fairest laurel that has ever fallen on 
me ; " as Carlyle counted his own election 
by the students of Edinburgh the highest 
honor ever paid himself. 

In 1874 Emerson published " Parnas- 



Emerson and Carlyle 205 

sus " ; in 1875 ne s p°ke at the centennial 
of the Concord fight, upon the very spot 
where the militia 

" Fired the shot heard round the world " ; 

in 1875 also he published " Letters and 
Social Aims''; in 1879 he read a paper be- 
fore the Harvard Divinity School on " The 
Preacher/' the last expression of his relig- 
ious views, and fit complement to the fa- 
mous address of forty years before. In this 
year, and again in 1880, he read papers be- 
fore the Concord School of Philosophy, in 
which, as the offspring of the old Transcen- 
dentalism, he was so deeply interested ; and 
in 1880 he gave his hundredth lecture be- 
fore the Concord Lyceum, on " New Eng- 
land Life and Letters." His last public 
acts were the reading of his tribute to Car- 
lyle, before the Massachusetts Historical 
Society, Feb. 10, 1881, and his lecture on 
" Aristocracy," at the Concord School of 
Philosophy, in July of the same year. The 
last time he left his house was to hear an 
essay by Dr. Harris of the Concord School, 
and then his neighbor, on Carlyle's " Sartor 



206 The Influence of Emerson 

Resartus." He died April 27, 1882. Of 
his final illness, the days just before his 
death, his son writes : " Though dulled to 
other impressions, to one he was fresh as 
long as he could understand anything, and, 
while even the familiar objects of his study 
began to look strange, he smiled and pointed 
to Carlyle's head and said, c That is my 
man, my good man ! ' I mention this be- 
cause it has been said that this friendship 
cooled, and that my father had for long 
years neglected to write to his early friend. 
He was loyal while life lasted, but had been 
unable to write a letter for years before he 
died. Their friendship did not need let- 
ters." It is a noteworthy thing that in his 
last letter to Carlyle, little divining that it 
was the last, Emerson should have cast a 
glance back over the long years of their 
friendship and penned this general judg- 
ment : " I count it my eminent happiness 
to have been so nearly your contemporary, 
and your friend, — permitted to detect by its 
rare light the new star almost before the 
Easterners had seen it, and to have found 
no disappointment, but joyful confirmation 



Emerson and Carlyle 207 

rather, in coming close to its orb." That 
was Emerson's final verdict, and it will 
stand. And Carlyle a little later wrote of 
" the silent but sacred covenant that exists 
between us two to the end." 

Much as there was in common in the 
aims and character and doctrine of Carlyle 
and Emerson, there was something, too, in 
common in the externalities of their lives, 
and much in the courses of their culture. 
Carlyle was almost a decade the older, born 
in the year of the " whiff of grape-shot," 
and just as " Wilhelm Meister " had been 
given to the world ; while Emerson's birth 
was just before the death of Kant and the 
crowning of Napoleon as emperor. Carlyle 
came of the old Covenanting stock ; Emerson 
was preceded by eight generations of Puritan 
ministers. Both were sent to the university, 
both destined, like Lessing, Kant, and 
Fichte, and so many of the great Germans 
whom they loved, for the ministry. Carlyle 
preached at least one sermon, — " a weak, 
flowery, sentimental piece," he calls it, on 
the text, " Before I was afflicted, I went 
astray " ; but he did not enter the ministry, 



208 The Influence of Emerson 

for the same reason that Emerson so soon 
abandoned it, — because he " found he did 
not believe the doctrines of his father's 
kirk." Emerson, the son of the minister of 
the First Church of Boston, became himself 
the minister of the Second Church ; but the 
ministry was for three or four- years only, 
ending with his differences with his congre- 
gation about the Lord's Supper, although 
he preached occasionally afterwards for sev- 
eral years. The strongest praise I have 
ever read of Carlyle as a possible preacher 
was that he might have become a second 
Chalmers. Alexander Ireland, who heard 
Emerson in the Unitarian chapel in Edin- 
burgh in 1833, says, "Not long before this 
I had listened to a wonderful sermon by Dr. 
Chalmers ; . . . but I must confess that the 
pregnant thoughts and serene self-possession 
of the young Boston minister had a greater 
charm for me than all the rhetorical splendors 
of Chalmers. " 

Both men, on leaving college, played the 
schoolmaster for a time ; and both, when 
their pedagogical and theological chapters 
were ended, embarked alike upon the in- 



Emerson and Carlyle 209 

dependent literary career, and never assumed 
any official or professional position. Carlyle 
passed nearly all his working life in his li- 
brary. Emerson transferred his ministry 
from the church to the platform, and re- 
mained a public man. It was his choice ; it 
was his joy. He craved public influence and 
relationship to men. Of a certain promising 
young literary man he said, " I doubted his 
genius when I saw that he did not seek a hear- 
ing." It was on the lecture platform, above 
all other places, that Emerson was at home. 
" My pulpit is the lyceum platform," he said. 
He was par excellence Emerson the Lecturer : 
he may almost be said to have founded the 
Lyceum in this country ; and, as has been 
remarked by another, he certainly gave it its 
form and character and made it the effi- 
cient instrument of instruction and reform 
which it was for the third of a century and 
more during which he occupied the platform. 
He was during this time, as Mr. Lowell has 
said, the most steadily attractive lecturer in 
America, always drawing, the charm of his 
voice, his manner, and his matter continually 
winning new multitudes, while never losing 



210 The Influence of Emerson 

its power over his earlier hearers. " The 
announcement that such a pleasure as a new 
course of lectures by him is coming," wrote 
Mr. Lowell, " to people as old as I am, is 
something like those forebodings of spring 
that prepare us every year for a familiar 
novelty, none the less novel, when it arrives, 
because it is familiar." Almost everything 
that Emerson wrote after the essay on "Nat- 
ure " was written originally for the platform. 
"Representative Men," "English Traits," 
" The Conduct of Life," " Letters and Social 
Aims," " Society and Solitude," — nearly 
everything that goes to make up these books 
had served first and many times as lectures. 
The impression which Emerson made upon 
the platform was captivating and command- 
ing. His voice and manner alike exercised 
a unique charm. " I have heard some great 
speakers and some accomplished orators," 
said Lowell, " but never any that so moved 
and persuaded men as he." " His voice 
and manner," writes Andrew D. White, re- 
ferring to the first time he heard Emerson 
lecture, " seemed to me the best I had ever 
known." " Emerson's voice," said Whipple, 



Emerson and Carlyle 211 

" had a strange power which affected me 
more than any other voice I ever heard on 
the stage or on the platform. " Such trib- 
utes might be multiplied indefinitely, alike 
from those who heard him in America and 
in England. In many places in England 
Emerson gave the lectures on cc Represen- 
tative Men," which treat several of the same 
subjects, — Shakespeare, Napoleon and, I 
was about to say, Goethe, but I remember 
that Carlyle purposely omitted Goethe from 
his course, complimentarily telling his hearers 
that they were not up to it, — which Carlyle 
had treated in his course on " Heroes and 
Hero-worship " delivered during his brief 
experience as a lecturer in London, ten 
years before. In London Emerson de- 
livered a special course on the " Mind and 
Manners of the Nineteenth Century," Car- 
lyle being among his hearers. These lect- 
ures were delivered in the same place, evi- 
dently, — Portman Square, — where Carlyle's 
own lectures were given. "Edward Street, 
Portman Square, the only free room there 
was," he says in " Reminiscences." Emer- 
son also gave certain lectures in Exeter 



212 The Influence of Emerson 

Hall, at one of which Carlyle was present. 
" He was seated by the joyful committee," 
Emerson writes his wife, "directly behind 
me as I spoke — a thing odious to me." 
Froude tells us that the first time he ever saw 
Carlyle was at Emerson's last London lect- 
ure, where he was pointed out to him by 
Clough ; and he says, " I heard his loud, 
kindly, contemptuous laugh when the lect- 
urer ended." Carlyle's highest praise of the 
first lectures, to Emerson himself, had been 
that they were " Emersonian " : to others he 
called them "Moonshine." But he spoke 
of some of the later lectures as " intellectual 
sonatas " ; and Emerson himself was " the 
seraphic man." 

Carlyle abominated lecturing. " Detest- 
able mixture of prophecy and play-actor- 
ism," is the way he describes his work as a 
lecturer, in "Reminiscences" — "vilest welter 
of odious confusions, horrors and repug- 
nancies." "Nothing could well be hate- 
fuller to me ; but I was obliged. . . . How we 
drove together, we poor two, to our place of 
execution, she with a little drop of brandy 
to give me at the very last ! " Yet Harriet 



Emerson and Carlyle 213 

Martineau, who was present at many of the 
lectures, assures us that the merits of his dis- 
courses were so great that he might probably 
have gone on year after year with improving 
success and perhaps ease ; but the struggle 
with nervous excitement and ill-health was 
too severe. Carlyle delivered three or four 
courses of these lectures in London. " Our 
main revenue three or four years now was 
lectures. " The last of these courses was 
that on " Heroes and Hero-worship," the 
concluding words of which will be remem- 
bered. 

The second course was on the " History 
of Literature, or the Successive Periods of 
European Culture from Homer to Goethe." 
A careful abstract of these lectures, by Pro- 
fessor Edward Dowden, from what was evi- 
dently a very full manuscript report, has 
been published. The history of culture is 
viewed, in these lectures, as a succession of 
faiths, interrupted by periods of scepticism. 
The faith of Greece and Rome is succeeded 
by the Christian faith, with an interval of 
pagan scepticism. The Christian faith, after 
the interval of Christian scepticism repre- 



214 The Influence of Emerson 

sented by Voltaire and culminating in the 
French Revolution, is transforming itself 
into a new thing not yet capable of defini- 
tion, of which Goethe in " Wilhelm Meister " 
and the " Westostlicher Divan " is a herald. 
Many passages in these lectures, on Dante, 
Shakespeare, Luther and the Reformation, 
the French Revolution, and German Litera- 
ture, are much the same as we find in others 
of Carlyle's writings, but put in a way 
often fresh and always forcible. 

Carlyle's first lecture in London was on 
May i, 1837. Dr. Chalmers was also lect- 
uring in London at the time ; and those in- 
terested in coincidences may like to know 
that on the evening of that day Browning's 
" Strafford " was produced for the first time 
by Macready at Covent Garden Theatre. 
The 'Times gave a very friendly notice of 
this first lecture by Carlyle, observing that 
" the lecturer, who seems new to the mere 
technicalities of public speaking, exhibited 
proofs, before he had done, of many of its 
higher and nobler attributes, gathering self- 
possession as he proceeded." It was agoniz- 
ing business for Carlyle ; but Mrs. Carlyle 



Emerson and Carlyle 215 

" had a steady hope " in him. The impres- 
sion which he made as a lecturer was really 
much better than he would lead us to sup- 
pose. A writer in the Examiner, perhaps 
Leigh Hunt, in noticing the first two lect- 
ures on the " History of Literature/' said : 
"He again extemporizes, he does not read. 
We doubted, on hearing the Monday's lect- 
ure, whether he would ever attain in this way 
to the fluency as well as depth for which he 
ranks among celebrated talkers in private; 
but Friday's discourse relieved us. He 
strode away like Ulysses himself, and had 
only to regret, in common with his audience, 
the limits to which the one hour confined 
him." George Ticknor was present at the 
ninth lecture of this course, and he noted in 
his diary (June 1, 1838): "He is a rather 
small, spare, ugly Scotchman, with a strong 
accent, which I should think he takes no 
pains to mitigate. To-day he spoke, as I 
think he commonly does, without notes, and 
therefore as nearly extempore as a man can 
who prepares himself carefully, as was plain 
he had done. He was impressive, I think, 
though such lecturing could not well be very 



2i6 The Influence of Emerson 

popular ; and in some parts, if he were not 
poetical, he was picturesque/ ' Ticknor es- 
timates the audience at about one hundred. 
We read that Emerson had a thousand 
hearers at his lecture on Montaigne, in Lon- 
don, and that he was greeted with loud 
applause. Perhaps this contrast in point of 
platform popularity was one thing that made 
Mrs. Carlyle, as Espinasse fancied, view 
Emerson with " a certain wife-like jealousy, 
as a sort of rival of her husband," although 
the latter's platform days had long been 
over. We have pleasant glimpses of Emer- 
son's London lectures from Henry Crabbe 
Robinson and Harriet Martineau. After 
the first London lecture the following ac- 
count appeared in Jerrold's Newspaper ', and 
it is interesting as preserving the impression 
which Emerson made as a lecturer upon 
an English audience in which Carlyle sat : 
" Precisely at four o'clock the lecturer glided 
in, and suddenly appeared at the reading- 
desk. Tall, thin, his features aquiline, his 
eye piercing and fixed, the effect, as he 
stood quietly before his audience, was at 
first somewhat startling, and then nobly im- 



Emerson and Carlyle 217 

pressive. Having placed his manuscript on 
the desk with nervous rapidity, and paused, 
the lecturer then quickly and, as it were, 
with a flash of action, turned over the first 
leaf, whispering at the same time, c Gentle- 
men and ladies' The initial sentences were 
pronounced in a low tone, a few words at 
a time, hesitatingly, as if then extemporane- 
ously meditated and not, as they really were, 
premeditated and forewritten. Time was 
thus given for the audience to meditate 
them, too. Meanwhile, the meaning, as it 
were, was dragged from under the veil and 
covering of the expression, and ever and 
anon a particular phrase was so emphatically 
italicized as to command attention. There 
was, however, nothing like acquired elocu- 
tion, no regular intonation, in fact, none of 
the usual oratorical artifices, but for the most 
part a shapeless delivery (only varied by cer- 
tain nervous twitches and angular movements 
of the hands and arms curious to see and 
even to smile at), and calling for much co- 
operation on the part of the auditor to help 
out its shortcomings. Along with all this, 
there was an eminent bonhomie, earnestness 



218 The Influence of Emerson 

and sincerity, which bespoke sympathy and 
respect — nay, more, secured veneration." 

Carlyle's love of lecturing evidently did 
not increase with his experience of it ; and 
from the time of cc Heroes and Hero-wor- 
ship " to the address as Lord Rector of 
Edinburgh I do not think he ever spoke in 
public. . The only passage which I recall in 
his writings in which he speaks with some 
real enthusiasm about lecturing or preaching 
is in a letter to Emerson at the time of his 
lectures on " Heroes and Hero-worship " 
and when Emerson was trying to induce him 
to come to America. He wrote after one of 
these lectures, along with sundry critical ob- 
servations upon his lecturing, that he had 
been "gratified nevertheless to see how the 
rudest speech of a man's heart goes into men's 
hearts, and is the welcomest thing there. 
Withal I regretted that I had not six months 
of preaching, whereby to learn to preach 
and explain things fully ! In the fire of the 
moment I had all but decided on setting out 
for America this autumn, and preaching far 
and wide like a very lion there. Quit your 
paper formulas, my brethren, — equivalent to 



Emerson and Carlyle 219 

old wooden idols, undivine as they ; in the 
name of God understand that you are alive 
and that God is alive ! Did the Upholsterer 
make this Universe ? Were you created by 
the Tailor ? I tell you, and conjure you to 
believe me literally, No, a thousand times, 
No ! Thus did I mean to preach, on 
c Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic/ in 
America too." 

For many years at this period of his life 
Carlyle's thoughts turned much towards 
America. The important chapter in the 
history of English Puritanism which the 
founding of New England constituted 
deeply affected him. The " Mayflower," to 
him, bore a richer freight than the cc Argo," 
and the thought of her desperately breasting 
the seas stirred his eloquence. But it was 
not simply the historical that moved him. 
As late as 1 849 he writes to Emerson of the 
Western frontiersman and the America wait- 
ing for its poet, and waiting to be born, in 
a buoyant and prophetic strain, such as 
might find place in the page of Whitman or 
of Emerson himself: " How beautiful to 
think of lean, tough Yankee settlers, tough 



220 The Influence of Emerson 

as gutta-percha, with most occult unsubdu- 
able fire in their belly, steering over the 
Western Mountains to annihilate the jungle, 
and bring bacon and corn out of it for the 
Posterity of Adam ! The Pigs in about a 
year eat up all the rattlesnakes for miles 
round : a most judicious function on the 
part of the Pigs. Behind the Pigs comes 
Jonathan with his all-conquering plough- 
share, — glory to him too ! Oh, if we were 
not a set of Cant-ridden blockheads, there is 
no Myth of Athene or Herakles equal to 
this fact ; — which I suppose will find its real 
c Poets ' some day or other ; when once 
the Greek, Semitic and multifarious other 
Cobwebs are swept away a little ! " The 
thought of Carlyle as a possible pioneer 
beside the Missouri or the Platte is even 
more stirring than the thought of him as the 
shepherd of a Transcendental flock beside 
the Concord and the Charles. It was his 
" odd dream " that he " might end in the 
western woods." 

Both Carlyle and Emerson got their new 
birth from Germany, — Carlyle immediately, 
from Schelling, Richter, Schiller, and Goethe ; 



Emerson and Carlyle 221 

Emerson mediately, from Coleridge and 
Carlyle himself. Of the early group of 
New England Transcendentalists Emerson 
tells us that " perhaps they only agreed in 
having fallen upon Coleridge and Words- 
worth and Goethe, then on Carlyle, with 
pleasure and sympathy." "He is almost 
more at home in our literature than our- 
selves," Goethe said of Carlyle. It was the 
Germanism of Carlyle and his close relations 
with Goethe which especially drew Emerson 
to him at the first. He had already found 
in Coleridge and Wordsworth a higher form 
of thought than Andrews Norton had to 
teach ; he had gone from one Boston church 
to another on Sunday mornings to hear 
Everett, fresh from his German studies; 
and his brother William had been to Ger- 
many to study theology, and had even gone 
to Goethe himself, to get his help about his 
doubts and duties. The indebtedness of 
both Carlyle and Emerson to German litera- 
ture and thought was long greater than to al- 
most all other sources. They were both, it 
is right to say, an integral part of the great 
German movement in thought, originating 



in The Influence of Emerson 

in Lessing, Herder, Kant, and Goethe. Yet 
Emerson never had a " new birth," either 
through German influence or any other, 
in the way in which Carlyle had. His in- 
tellectual life was not a struggle, with its 
crises, but a steady and serene unfolding 
and enrichment ; and it may fairly be ques- 
tioned, as the English critic questions 
whether he would not have been essentially 
the same if he had never met Carlyle, 
whether he would not also have been the 
same had he never read Goethe, — to whom, 
nevertheless, his obligations were so distinct 
and great. 

It was the example of Schiller which en- 
couraged Carlyle to venture on the literary 
life. " The biographies of English men of 
letters/' he says somewhere, " are the wretch- 
edest chapters in our history, except the 
Newgate Calendar." But Germany fur- 
nished brighter examples ; and the situation 
of Schiller especially, a youth of poverty, 
obstructions of all sorts, bad health, and the 
despondent tendency, was like his own, 
while Schiller's unswerving fidelity, his firm 
moral convictions, enduring through the 



Emerson and Carlyle 223 

breaking up of creeds, and his final triumph 
gave confidence and inspiration. 

From Schiller and like Schiller, Carlyle 
turned to Goethe, and found in him full 
satisfaction to the end. " Goethe especially 
was my evangelist," he said. If anybody's 
disciple, Carlyle was Goethe's disciple. 
" Emerson," Mr. Sanborn says rightly, 
"resembled Goethe more than Carlyle re- 
sembled Schiller " ; although Grimm rightly 
notes, in comparing Emerson with Goethe 
and Schiller, that he was like Schiller in 
coming to the front in public emergencies, 
sharing the deep feelings of his time and 
people, to which Goethe was so often in- 
different, turning seldom to anything save 
what was congenial. It must be remem- 
bered here that Carlyle, in his essay on 
Goethe, repeats with sympathy the declara- 
tion of Schiller, that the poet is a citizen not 
only of his country, but of his time ; what- 
ever occupies and interests men in general 
will interest him still more. Emerson called 
no man master and had far less of the element 
of discipleship in him than Carlyle ; but he 
pronounced Goethe the leading mind of the 



224 The Influence of Emerson 

century, and Grimm, in writing of Goethe, 
acknowledges his debt to Emerson for the 
point of view from whence correctly to judge 
him. " Since Shakespeare there has been 
no mind of equal compass to Goethe's. 
There is the wise man. He has the largest 
range of thought, the most catholic mind ; 
a person who has spoken in every science, 
and has added to the scientific lore of other 
students, and who represents better than 
any other individual the progressive mind 
of the present age." Place beside this the 
judgment of Carlyle : " In Goethe we dis- 
cover by far the most striking instance, in 
our time, of a writer who is, in strict speech, 
what Philosophy can call a Man. He is 
neither noble nor plebeian, neither liberal nor 
servile, nor infidel nor devotee, — but the 
best excellence of all these, joined in pure 
union, ' a clear and universal Man.' ' Emer- 
son was an untiring reader of Goethe, urged 
to it by Carlyle, — read every one of the 
fifty-five volumes of his works, including 
"The Theory of Color," in the original, 
read him more than any other of the Ger- 
mans, more probably than all of the rest 



Emerson and Carlyle 225 

together; and in the last letter which he 
wrote to Herman Grimm (1 871) he said, 
" For Goethe I think I have an always 
ascending regard." "'Wilhelm Meister,"' 
he once said, "contains the analysis of life" ; 
but " Faust " he " could not read nor en- 
dure," and he confessed late in life that he 
was unfamiliar with the Second Part. Less 
the disciple of Goethe than Carlyle, Emerson 
is more like him, — like him in his interest 
in nature as well as in man, his confidential 
love of nature, in his love of art, in the poet 
in him, in the enjoyment of life, above all 
in his calm repose. There was little of the 
Olympian about Carlyle, little of the Goethe 
temperament. He was more like Fichte 
among the Germans. Without dyspepsia, 
he would have been a Fichte ; with dyspep- 
sia, Fichte's "Addresses to the German 
People " and " Characteristics of the Present 
Age " would have been like " Past and 
Present " and " Latter-day Pamphlets." 
Goethe was less than Emerson in ethical and 
religious stature. If to his other qualities 
had been added the moral elevation of Kant, 
he would have been the greater Emerson. 



226 The Influence of Emerson 

The moral temptations, the self-compla- 
cency, and the lack of aspiration in Goethe, 
which made Parker — most mistakenly — 
rank his manhood and his influence alike 
below Voltaire's, and made him " rather be 
Blake sweeping Tromp out of the Channel 
for the nation's sake," Emerson was deeply 
conscious of. Goethe's thinking, though of 
great altitude, he found a table-land, without 
the "great felicities and miracles of poetry." 
" Of Shakespeare and the transcendent muse, 
no syllable." Emerson was no believer in 
culture for culture's sake ;. and he cannot 
forgive Goethe, being the great man that he 
was, for not being a greater man, " a re- 
deemer of the human mind." He was " the 
poet of the Actual, not of the Ideal ; the 
poet of limitation, not of possibility ; of 
this world, and not of religion and hope." 

Men of striking originality both, most 
quotable writers of the century, Carlyle and 
Emerson have both been peculiarly quoters 
and men of books, men who smack of the 
library. The best thing that the university 
does for a man, said Emerson in his better 
way, is to place him in intelligent possession 



Emerson and Carlyle 227 

of the keys of the library. Books are the 
scholar's tools. Emerson's essay on " Books " 
should be put into the hands of every young 
man beginning life. "The colleges," he 
said, " whilst they provide us with libraries, 
furnish no professor of books ; and I think 
no chair is so much wanted." Carlyle said 
the same thing in almost the same words ; 
and both would have rejoiced at the degree 
to which many of our great modern libra- 
rians, in colleges and out of them, construe 
it as one of their regular and main functions 
to be professors of books. One would like 
to write an essay upon Emerson in the Study, 
dealing with the books which influenced 
him and with his essays in criticism.* One 

* Dr. Holmes gives an interesting table of the twenty-seven men 
whom Emerson mentions twenty times or more, ranging from Shake- 
speare (112) to Chaucer, Coleridge, and Michael Angelo (20). See 
Cabot, vol. i., 288 5 also the section in John Morley's essay on 
Emerson which deals with Emerson's use of books and breadth of 
literary reference. One of the most interesting chapters of that very 
valuable little volume of "Talks with Emerson," by Mr. Charles J. 
Woodbury, which was a distinct new contribution to our knowledge 
of Emerson's thought, is that entitled "Criticism," reporting Emer- 
son's judgments upon many writers, some not elsewhere touched upon. 
Gibbon, although a great example of diligence and truth, was "a 
mind without a shrine." "Read Chaucer! " — and he repeated with- 
out hesitation several verses from his "Good Counsel," saying, "I 



228 The Influence of Emerson 

would like to do the same concerning Car- 
lyle. So much can easily be said, — that 
where we have an essay by Carlyle on any 
great writer, — Goethe, Richter, Novalis, Vol- 
taire, Johnson, Scott, or Burns, — there we 
almost always have the best essay upon the 

would copy it and have it always with me j it is a scripture." "I 
have seen an expurgated edition of Chaucer," he added. "Shun it! 
Shun expurgated editions of any one, even Aphra Bene or Francois 
Villon. They will be expurgating the Bible and Shakespeare next." 
" Don Quixote " and novels generally "made him yawn." "Why 
read novels ? We meet stranger creatures than their heroes. What 
writer of stories would not be derided if he gave us creatures as impos- 
sible as Nero or Alva or Joan of Arc ? " His depreciation of novels 
here, however, must be offset by his warm word of appreciation and 
prophecy of the novel's future, in his essay on "Books," and his 
remarks in his letters to Grimm, that, when he read rarely a good novel, 
he felt rebuked that he did not use "these delicious relations," and 
that he thought the tale, as opposed to the drama, "the form that 
is always in season." Of the American historians, Prescott was 
"thorough," Motley "painstaking," and Bancroft " reads enor- 
mously," and " always understands his subject" j but neither of them 
* ' lifts himself off his feet" ; they "have no lilt in them." "Do 
not read by the bookful," he said. "Often a chapter is enough. 
The glance reveals when the gaze obscures. Skip the paragraphs that 
do not talk to you." "Avoid all secondhand, borrowing books: 
* Collections of — ,' i Beauties of — ,' etc. Do your own quarrying." 
" Read those men who are not lazy, who put themselves into contact 
with realities." "All criticism dealing with isolated points is super- 
ficial ; the prevailing thought and disposition are your main care." 
"Stop reading if you find yourself becoming absorbed." "Shut the 
book when your own thought comes." "Seek first spirit, and 
second spirit, and third and evermore spirit." 



Emerson and Carlyle 229 

subject which is to be found in the library. 
Carlyle was probably the greatest reader of 
books, as well as the greatest writer of them, 
in the England of his time. Both men were 
too great to entertain the upstart's fancy 
that greatness and originality lie in inde- 
pendence and trust in one's own intuitions. 
" The great man," said Emerson, " must 
be a great reader, and possess great assimilat- 
ing power. He must depend upon others, 
because intuition is not constant, while we 
must try our own intuitions by those of 
other minds." 

No men of our time have written better 
upon books and reading than Carlyle and 
Emerson, few have passed better literary 
judgments, none have kept company with 
better books. Both were at home with the 
Elizabethan and Puritan writers. One-third 
of the selections in " Parnassus " are from 
the seventeenth century. Both have written 
in the same strain of Shakespeare ; but it is 
clear that Emerson really lived closest to 
him. " Shakespeare was a wonder," he said 
to Mr. Woodbury : " he struck twelve every 
time." " Perhaps the human mind," he said, 



230 The Influence of Emerson 

" would be a gainer if all the secondary 
writers were lost — say, in England, all but 
Shakespeare, Milton, and Bacon. " Carlyle 
always spoke slightingly of Bacon. To Em- 
erson, Bacon's essays were cc a little bible of 
earthly wisdom. " Bacon and Berkeley " have 
been friends to me." 

It is singular that Carlyle's references to 
Milton are so brief, casual, and unimportant. 
Above all men he loved the great Puri- 
tans. " I don't know, in any history of 
Greece or Rome, where you will get so fine 
a man as Oliver Cromwell." He loved 
John Knox in highest measure — and all 
men of that class. His " Cromwell " is the 
best contribution yet to the history of Puri- 
tanism, and that one of his historical books 
which will longest endure. By interesting 
coincidence, the only history which Emerson 
ever wished that he might write was a 
history of Calvinism with reference to its 
influence on New England. We should 
have expected a glowing panegyric of Mil- 
ton in the " Cromwell " ; but it is not there, 
although we are sure that this is but an un- 
fortunate accident, and that Carlyle would 



Emerson and Carlyle 231 

have written it heartily. Emerson declared 
Milton to stand foremost of all men in 
literary history, and so of all men, in the 
power to inspire. There was no man in 
history, literary or political, whom he 
honored more or with whom he more natu- 
rally measured himself. Dr. Holmes dwells 
on the parallelisms in their characters, their 
writings, and their lives. Emerson thinks 
of Milton on the ship which bears him back 
to America from his first European visit. 
" Milton did not love moral perfection more 
than I." Milton was the subject of one of 
his earliest lectures in Boston. In Milton 
" the man was paramount to the poet " ; and 
he remarks upon the reason, the force of 
which he had felt in his own life, why, " the 
most devout man in history, he frequented 
no church." " Better than any other he has 
discharged the office of every great man, 
namely, to raise the idea of Man in the minds 
of his contemporaries and of posterity. . . . 
Human nature in these ages is indebted to 
him for its best portrait." " There is not 
in literature," he said, " a more noble out- 
line of a wise external education than that 



232 The Influence of Emerson 

which Milton drew up, at the age of thirty- 
six, in his letter to Samuel Hartlib " ; and 
his own great address on Education, the 
most pregnant and inspiring word on edu- 
cation yet spoken by an American, the 
most memorable English word since Milton, 
has the same dominant note which Milton 
sounded, — the note of nobleness. During 
his last visit to London he went to Milton's 
grave, and inquired, " Do many come here ? " 
" Yes, sir, Americans." This picture of Em- 
erson by Milton's grave in the old Cripple- 
gate church is also to be commended to the 
painter. 

Scott, of whom Carlyle wrote one of his 
most interesting essays, seemed to Emerson 
to inspire his readers more than any other 
modern writer with affection to his own per- 
sonality, and in the strength and variety of his 
characters to approach Shakespeare nearest. 
" There are no books for boys/' he said, 
"like the poems of Sir Walter Scott. c Mar- 
mion,' the c Lay of the Last Minstrel/ and 
the c Lady of the Lake ' surpass everything 
we have for boy-reading.' ' Burns was as 
dear to Emerson as to Carlyle himself. 



Emerson and Carlyle 233 

" The Confession of Augsburg, the Declara- 
tion of Independence, the French Rights of 
Man and the Marseillaise are not more 
weighty documents in the history of free- 
dom than the songs of Burns. ... I find his 
great, plain sense in close chain with the 
greatest masters — Rabelais, Shakespeare in 
comedy, Cervantes, Butler and Burns." 
" My excited fancy," says Mr. Lowell, in 
speaking of the enthusiasm of Emerson's 
discourse on Burns, "set me under the 
bema, listening to him who fulmined over 
Greece." * 

* It was this address on Burns which prompted Judge Hoar to the 
most remarkable tribute ever paid to the eloquence of Emerson. This 
was in his letter read at the meeting of the Massachusetts Historical 
Society in May, 1882, immediately after Emerson's death. Two things 
he wrote to emphasize. The first was Emerson's power as a historian, 
of which he gave an impressive instance, and then added: "The sec- 
ond is his power as an orator , rare and peculiar, and in its way un- 
equalled among our contemporaries. Many of us can recall instances 
of it, and there are several prominent in my recollection; but perhaps 
the most striking was his address at the Burns centennial, in Boston, 
on the 25th of January, 1 8 59. The company that he addressed was 
a queer mixture. First, there were the Burns club, — grave, critical, 
and long-headed Scotchmen, jealous of the fame of their countryman, 
and doubtful of the capacity to appreciate him in men of other blood. 
There were the scholars and poets of Boston and its neighborhood, 
and professors and undergraduates from Harvard College. Then there 
were state and city officials, aldermen and common councilmen, 



234 The Influence of Emerson 

Coleridge was one of Emerson's masters ; 
it was because Coleridge led him to the Ger- 
mans. The fame of Wordsworth he re- 
garded as a leading fact in modern literature. 
Wordsworth was " the poet of England — 
the only one who comes up to high-water 
mark. , ' " He has done more for the sanity 
of this generation/' he wrote in the Dial, 
" than any other author " ; and in his own 
Concord quiet he felt that a large part of 
this sanity was in living in Westmoreland 

brokers and bank directors, ministers and deacons, doctors, lawyers, 
and ' carnal self-seekers ' of every grade. I have had the good fort- 
une to hear many of the chief orators of our time, among them 
Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams, Ogden Hoffman, S. S. Prentiss, 
William H. Seward, Charles Sumner, Wendell Phillips, George Will- 
iam Curtis, some of the great preachers, and Webster, Everett, 
Choate, and Winthrop at their best. But I never witnessed such an 
effect of speech upon men as Mr. Emerson apparently then attained. 
It reached at once to his own definition of eloquence, *a taking sov- 
ereign possession of the audience.' He had uttered but a few sen- 
tences before he seemed to have welded together the whole mass of 
discordant material and lifted them to the same height of sympathy and 
passion. He excited them to smiles, to tears, to the wildest enthu- 
siasm. His tribute to Burns is beautiful to read, perhaps the best 
which the occasion produced on either side of the ocean. But the 
clear articulation, the ringing emphasis, the musical modulation of 
tone and voice, the loftiness of bearing, and the radiance of his face, 
all made a part of the consummate charm. When he closed, the 
company could hardly tolerate any other speaker, though good ones 
were to follow." 



Emerson and Carlyle 13 s 

and out of London. " The * Excursion ' was 
nearer to nature than anything we had be- 
fore. ... It was the human soul in these last 
ages striving for a publication of itself. ,> He 
could quote almost entirely the "Prelude" 
and " Excursion " ; and he included more 
selections from Wordsworth in his " Parnas- 
sus " than from any other save Shakespeare. 
From Carlyle on Coleridge in the Life of 
Sterling, and on Wordsworth in " Rem- 
iniscences " there is no need of quoting. 
" A man of great and useless genius " he 
calls Coleridge in one of his letters. Southey 
Emerson and Carlyle rated alike. When 
Landor praised Southey to Emerson, Emer- 
son was " pestered " by it, and exclaimed, 
" But who is Southey ? " When Carlyle read 
Southey's article on the Saint Simonians in 
the Quarterly, he said, " My brother, I say 
unto thee, thou art a poor creature." Lan- 
dor himself was one of the four eminent men 
of letters — Coleridge, Carlyle, and Words- 
worth the others — whom Emerson sought 
out in his first visit to Europe, in 1833, and 
to whom he devoted the first chapter of his 
" English Traits." Noting in this chapter 



136 The Influence of Emerson 

that Landor is " strangely undervalued in 
England, usually ignored, and sometimes 
savagely attacked," he records his own admi- 
ration of his energy and creative force, and 
his judgment that "year after year the 
scholar must still go back to Landor for a 
multitude of elegant sentences — for wisdom, 
wit and indignation that are unforge table." 
He writes of Landor as of the others of the 
four in the Dial: "We do not recollect 
an example of more complete independence 
in literary life;" " he is a man full of thoughts, 
but not, like Coleridge, a man of ideas " ; # 
and as late at least as 1865 he was st ^ prais- 
ing Landor in yet higher terms. 

*It was not until 1856, twenty-three years after the interview 
with Landor in Florence, that " English Traits" was published ; and 
it provoked an Open Letter from Landor to Emerson, published in 
pamphlet form at Bath, which, now almost forgotten and unknown, 
is one of the curiosities of literature. Mannerly and courteous through- 
out, it gives evidence that Landor had been much more " pestered " 
by some things Emerson had said about himself than Emerson had 
been by Landor's own enthusiasm about Southey. For Southey he 
again takes up the cudgel, depreciating Carlyle and Wordsworth in 
contrast. When he had once heard Wordsworth remark that he 
"would not give five shillings for all of Southey's poetry," he had 
told a friend that he " might safely make such investment of his 
money and throw all his own poetry in." Southey, on the strength 
of Landor's early poem, "Gebir," had compared him with Goethe, 
and given him the preference. He hastens to say that he doesn't con- 



Emerson and Carlyle 237 

In Byron, Emerson sees a perverted will 
and a wasted life, once speaks of his genius 
as " unhallowed " ; yet to Mr. Thayer, on 
the California trip in 1871, he spoke highly 
of Byron as an efficient poet, observing 
that " there is a sort of scenic and general 
luck about him." Carlyle, whose first mes- 
sage to the world almost had been, " Shut 
your Byron ; open your Goethe/' after- 
wards, when he heard of Byron's death, 
affected perhaps by Goethe's own great 
admiration for Byron, felt that "the no- 
blest spirit in Europe " was gone. " If 

sider this the greatest praise in the world ; that, in his judgment, 
"fifty pages of Shelley contain more true poetry than a hundred pages 
of Goethe," that " Wilhelm Meister"3s "trash," and that Goethe 
couldn't have written in a lifetime any twenty of his own " Imaginary 
Conversations." Gravitating to politics, he says, " Democracy, such 
as yours in America, is my abhorrence"; and he makes a vigorous 
plea for the lost art of assassination, counting the stigma placed upon 
it by the moderns a proof of our lapse from classic virtue, and calling 
especially for a revival of it with reference to the Austrian tyrant then 
trampling upon Italy. It might be guessed that here, as Emerson 
found touching other things in 1833, Landor " carries to its height 
the love of freak which the English delight to indulge ' ' ; but he is 
entirely serious. As concerns Landor's depreciation of Goethe, one 
remembers that Emerson had the same experience with Wordsworth. 
"He proceeded to abuse Goethe's 'Wilhelm Meister ' heartily. It 
was full of all manner of fornication. He had never gone farther 
than the first part ; so disgusted was he that he threw the book across 
the room. ' ' 



238 The Influence of Emerson 

they had said the sun or moon was gone 
out of the heavens," wrote Miss Welsh, 
whom Carlyle only two years before had 
taught to shun Byron, "it could not have 
struck me with the idea of a more awful or 
dreary blank in the creation than the words, 
c Byron is dead ' " ; and Carlyle answered, 
"The news of his death came upon my 
heart like a mass of lead — as if I had 
lost a brother. Late so full of fire and 
generous passion and proud purposes ; and 
now forever dumb. Poor Byron ! and but 
a young man, still struggling amidst the 
perplexities and sorrows and aberrations 
of a mind not arrived at maturity, or set- 
tled in its proper place in life. Had he 
been spared to the age of three-score and 
ten, what might he not have done, what 
might he not have been ! " 

Emerson " never could endure Shelley," 
Whipple tells us. " Shelley, though a poetic 
mind, is never a poet," he says somewhere. 
" I cannot read Shelley with comfort," he 
said to Mr. Woodbury. <c His visions 
are not in accord with the facts ; they are 
not accurate. He soars to sink." One 



Emerson and Carlyle 239 

can imagine the suffering, however one 
may differ from Emerson's judgment of 
Shelley, — and I find its severity hard to 
understand, — with which he would have 
read Mr. Chapman's judgment, that in 
" Nature " he showed himself " a sort of 
Yankee Shelley " ! Swinburne and the 
Englishmen of the fleshly ilk Emerson 
could not abide. In William Morris's verse 
he found much to admire, but he wished there 
were less of it. Of Browning and Ruskin he 
wrote no adequate or important word. As 
early as the days of the Dial, he discerned 
the genius of Tennyson. He "wants rude 
truth, he is too fine " ; but it will be "long 
before we have his superior" as a lyrist. 
He met Tennyson in London in 1847, and 
found him the "most satisfying" of the 
English men of letters whom he had seen. 
" I do not meet, in these late decades, such 
company over a pipe," was Carlyle's appre- 
ciation of Tennyson. 

There was almost none of his contem- 
poraries in literary London for whom 
Carlyle had real admiration; there were 
few for whom he even expresses respect. 



240 The Influence of Emerson 

"Among the scrambling miscellany of 
notables that hovered about us, Leigh 
Hunt was probably the best/' — Leigh 
Hunt deeply impressed Emerson in Lon- 
don as a pure and beautiful spirit, — 
"Charles Lamb the worst." Campbell's 
head was a "shop" and his heart "as dry 
as a Greenock kipper"; Proctor was a good- 
natured man, but " essentially a small " ; 
De Quincey, " the dwarf opium - eater," 
" carries a laudanum bottle in his pocket 
and the venom of a wasp in his heart " ; 
Hazlitt was writing his way through France 
and Italy, "the ginshops and pawnbrokers 
bewailing his absence." " Good heavens ! 
I often inwardly exclaim, and is this the 
literary world ? This rascal rout, this dirty 
rabble, destitute not only of high feeling and 
knowledge or intellect, but even of com- 
mon honesty ! . . . Not red-blooded men 
at all ; only things for writing articles." 
Yet we must remember that Emerson and 
Goethe, whom Carlyle esteemed so highly, 
were his contemporaries ; and we must not 
forget his enthusiasm for Dickens, his love 
for Mill, and the essay on the Corn Law 
Rhymes. 



Emerson and Carlyle 241 

Emerson's appreciation of his American 
contemporaries was generous and enthusiastic. 
Channing, who belonged more perhaps to 
the preceding generation than his own, he 
especially revered. He was "the star of 
the American church," " one of those men 
who vindicate the power of the American 
race to produce greatness/' Of his relation 
to the group of Transcendentalists it is not 
necessary to speak. He had great admira- 
tion for the verses of Helen Hunt ; he re- 
garded Forceythe Willson as a poet of ex- 
traordinary promise ; he brought Ellery 
Channing's " Wanderer " before the public ; 
and he greeted Walt Whitman "at the be- 
ginning of a great career." " It was one 
part of Emerson's mission," says Sanborn, 
"to appreciate the best of contemporary 
authors before the great world did so. Lan- 
dor, Carlyle, Charles Reade and Matthew 
Arnold are cases in point, not to mention 
Alcott, Thoreau and Ellery Channing, 
William Allingham and David Wasson." 
He devoted much time and pains to secur- 
ing the publication of Jones Very's essays 
and poems. Quick in praise of new authors, 



242 The Influence of Emerson 

he was plain in criticism. Whitman's 
" Leaves of Grass " is " a singular blending 
of the Bhagavat Ghita and the New York 
Heraldr 

He discussed his American contemporaries 
very freely with Mr. Woodbury, paying trib- 
ute to Dr. Holmes's acuteness, fine sensibil- 
ity, versatility, and catholicity of taste ; to 
Lowell's geniality and wit, — " it does one 
good to read him " ; to Thoreau, of whom 
he talked oftener and more tenderly than 
any other, calling him " my Spartan- 
Buddhist," " a man whose core and whose 
breath was conscience" ; to Forceythe Will- 
son, whose parting song " far surpasses Poe 
in his most peculiar vein " ; and to Alcott, 
whose life is " full of beatitudes." "Soc- 
rates thought Athens ought to support him ; 
and Alcott thinks Boston commonwealth 
ought to support him — and it ought." 
Louisa Alcott " is, and is to be, the poet of 
children ; she knows their angels." Walt 
Whitman, whose " Leaves of Grass " is 
"wonderful," he contrasts with Poe and his 
"happy jingle," — almost the very phrase, 
it will be remembered, which he used con- 



Emerson and Carlyle 243 

cerning Poe in talking with Mr. Howells. 
He would have read with curious surprise 
the recent dictum of one of our leading liter- 
ary journals, that the three greatest Ameri- 
can men of letters are " Emerson, Haw- 
thorne, and Poe." He would have said that 
a first qualification for a great man of letters 
is to have something of import to say ; and 
he would have named a dozen poems of 
Lowell's — to go no farther — as beautiful 
in word and form as anything of Poe's, 
with the additional merit of import. The 
real greatness of Hawthorne he failed to 
appreciate. " No one ought to write as 
Hawthorne has," he said ; and concern- 
ing " The Scarlet Letter " he exclaimed, 
" Ghastly, ghastly ! " This was in accord- 
ance with a general principle of his. " I do 
not read the sad in literature," he said. He 
would not read fC Les Miserables." " In all 
good writings " he expected to find some- 
thing " hearty or happy." cc Melancholy is 
unendurable," he said; "grief is abnormal." 
The extent to which Emerson pressed 
this doctrine, wholesome and necessary as it 
is in its right measure, surely marks one 



^44 The Influence of Emerson 

of his limitations ; and in the argument be- 
tween him and young Woodbury, which the 
latter reports, the student has the stronger 
case, showing what the deep and tragical 
notes are which breathe through the Bible 
from Genesis to Revelation, from the story 
of Job to the story of Calvary ; what the 
problems are with which Greek tragedy and 
the Eastern scripture deal ; what it is that 
Dante wrote into his poem and life wrote 
into Dante's face ; what the myriad miseries 
and sorrows are which Shakespeare was " too 
faithful to humanity to conceal " ; and what 
the sights were which blind Milton saw, — 
what the imperatives to " Paradise Lost," 
" Samson Agonistes," and " II Penseroso." 
Perhaps the strongest pages in Mr. Morley's 
essay are those in which he similarly points 
out Emerson's failure to grapple as Milton 
and Michael Angelo and Dante and 
iEschylus and Isaiah grapple — yes, and 
Hawthorne and Hugo and Carlyle — with 
the world's dark tragedies of sin and suffer- 
ing, depravity and death.* 

*To Michael Angelo he makes concessions. "I miss cheerful- 
ness/' he says, writing of him to Herman Grimm. "He is tragic, 



Emerson and Carlyle 245 

We are brought here so close to the point 
which is most discussed by religious critics 
in their essays upon Emerson, the point of 
his Christianism in relation to his Hellenism, 
that reference should be made to his own 
clearest and strongest statement of his posi- 
tion. That, it seems to me, is his essay on 
" The Tragic/' which, first given as a lect- 
ure, then published in the Dial, stands now 
as the last essay in the last volume of his 
complete Works, with its last words these : 
" The intellect in its purity and the moral 
sense in its purity are not distinguished from 
each other, and both ravish us into a region 
whereinto these passionate clouds of sorrow 
cannot rise." Emerson is not blind to the 
world's sorrow. His first words are : "He 
has seen but half the universe who never has 
been shown the house of Pain." But he 
holds that " all sorrow dwells in a low re- 
gion." The real tragic element, he insists, 
is almost invariably Terror; and Terror is 
born of ignorance of our own real nature and 

like Dante." "But," he adds, "we must let him be as sad as he 
pleases. He is one of the indispensable men on whose credit the race 
goes." He pays tribute to him, also, as "a noble, suffering soul, — 
poor, that others may be rich." 



246 The Influence of Emerson 

of the constitution of the universe. "All 
melancholy, as all passion, belongs to the ex- 
terior life." But when a man is " grounded 
in the divine life by his proper roots," — that 
is, when he sees the end from the beginning, 
as God sees it, — he can feel neither terror nor 
sorrow ; and the task of the religious man, 
the son of God, is to elevate life to tran- 
scendence of both. Sorrow and suffering, in 
a word, are not attributes of the Infinite, but 
of the finite and imperfect. The Divine is 
joyful, because it always knows the function 
of discipline and sees that the end is good ; 
and we rise to this confidence and serenity 
as we realize our own divinity. So far as 
we are God, so far we do not sorrow. 
There is no other word of Emerson so 
Greek as this ; but here and not elsewhere 
the discussion of his attitude toward suffer- 
ing and sin and sorrow must begin. 

Emerson was greatly attracted by Mon- 
taigne. When a boy, he found a volume of 
Montaigne's essays among his father's books. 
After leaving college, it came again to his 
notice, and he procured the remaining vol- 
umes. " I remember the delight and won- 



Emerson and Carlyle 247 

der," he says, " in which I lived with it. It 
seemed to me as if I had myself written the 
book in some former life, so sincerely it 
spoke to my thought and experience." Yet 
he once said to a young man, "You shall 
not read Montaigne and be a poet/' although 
at the same time he noted the fact that 
Montaigne's Essays was the only book 
known to have been owned by Shakespeare. 
Of Plutarch, whom he loves, he says : " He 
perpetually suggests Montaigne, who was 
the best reader he has ever found, though 
Montaigne excelled his master in the point 
and surprise of his sentences. Plutarch had 
a religion which Montaigne wanted, and 
which defends him from wantonness/' It 
is noteworthy that among Carlyle's earliest 
writings also was an article on Montaigne — 
one of the articles contributed to the Edin- 
burgh Encyclopaedia — and that this notice 
contains no word about Montaigne's re- 
religious scepticism, but treats the character 
purely from its human and literary sides. 
" Montaigne's faithful delineation of human 
feelings, in all their strength and weakness, 
will serve as a mirror to every mind capable 
of self-examination." 



248 The Influence of Emerson 

It was through Montaigne that Emerson 
and John Sterling were first drawn together. 
Sterling wrote a loving criticism of Mon- 
taigne in the Westminster Review, with a 
journal of his own pilgrimage to Montaigne's 
estate and chateau, which attracted Emer- 
son's attention ; and soon after he records, 
" Carlyle writes me word that this same lover 
of Montaigne is a lover of me." Sterling 
had taken " Nature " to his heart ; and Car- 
lyle writes of him to Emerson as one " whom 
I love better than anybody I have met with 
since a certain sky-messenger alighted to me 
at Craigenputtock and vanished in the Blue 
again." Emerson and Sterling at once en- 
tered into correspondence ; and this corre- 
spondence, extending almost to the day of 
Sterling's death, and recently published with 
a tender introduction by Emerson's son, 
constitutes one of the most beautiful chapters 
in the biographies of the two men, who 
strangely never met. In one letter Sterling 
writes to Emerson, " You are the only man 
in the world with whom, though unseen, 
I feel any sort of nearness," making us 
think of the closeness with which that other 



Emerson and Carlyle 249 

rare English spirit, whose spiritual struggles 
were so like Sterling's, Arthur Hugh 
Clough, was drawn to Emerson.* Emer- 
son felt that Sterling " had certain American 
qualities in his genius." To Emerson 
Sterling dedicated in the following lines 
his tragedy of " Strafford,' ' published the 
year before his death : — 

u Teacher of starry wisdom, high, serene, 

Receive the gift our common ground supplies ; 
Red flowers, dark leaves, that ne'er on earth had 
been 
Without the influence of sidereal skies." 

Both Emerson and Carlyle read much 
that was ephemeral and contemporaneous, 
studied and wrote much upon the social 
movements of their period, published much 
in the magazines. Emerson was editor of 
two reviews, and one of the group of writers 
who started the Atlantic Monthly; and he 
knew the value of newspapers — and their 
danger to the scholar. " Newspapers have 
done much to abbreviate expression, and 
so to improve style. They are to occupy 

* Herman Grimm, in 1867, wrote to Emerson in almost Sterling's 
words, " I can mention no one whom I wish to know except yourself." 



250 The Influence of Emerson 

during your generation," he said to the 
Williams student, " a large share of atten- 
tion ; and the most studious and engaged 
man can only neglect them at his cost. 
But have little to do with them. Learn 
how to get their best without their getting 
yours. Do not read them when the mind 
is creative; and do not read them thor- 
oughly. Remember they are made for 
everybody, and don't try to get what isn't 
meant for you. There is a great secret in 
knowing what to keep out of the mind as 
well as what to put in. Give yourself only 
so many minutes for the paper; then you 
will learn to avoid the stuff put in for 
people who have nothing to think." He 
would give to Concord and Boston and 
London what was their due ; but he would 
not let the young scholar forget his citizen- 
ship in Rome and Athens and Palestine and 
Persia. 

Emerson greatly loved the Persian poets, 
and he wrote a preface to an American edi- 
tion of Saadi's " Gulistan." He loved the 
Vedas, put India into poems, and was really 
the first to turn American hunger or curi- 



Emerson and Carlyle 251 

osity toward the Orient. The time which 
Emerson gave to Persian poetry Carlyle 
gave to Norse mythology ; and perhaps he 
found a greater affinity with his own char- 
acter in Odin and Thor than Emerson 
found in Saadi and Hafiz. 

Both men lived much in the classical 
world, Emerson especially with Plato and Plu- 
tarch. The Meditations of Marcus Aure- 
lius, with whom Arnold chose to rank him, 
were especially dear to him in his youth. 
Emerson's favorite study in school and 
college days was Greek, and many of 
his translations of both Greek and Latin 
authors were remarkably good. In mathe- 
matics he could make no headway, whereas 
Carlyle's mathematical ability was so great 
as to have drawn the attention of Legendre. 
He translated Legendre's Geometry, and he 
was at one time a prominent candidate for 
the professorship of astronomy in Edin- 
burgh University. " Of the old Greek 
books," said Emerson, "there are five 
which we cannot spare : Homer, Herodotus, 
iEschylus, Plato, and Plutarch " ; but really 
only the last two seem to have been among 



252 The Influence of Emerson 

his inseparable friends. There is no writer 
of whom he speaks with more constant 
fondness than Plutarch. No other Amer- 
ican has written of Plutarch so well. " I 
must think we are more deeply indebted to 
him than to all the ancient writers," he says. 
" I do not know where to find a book, to 
borrow a phrase of Ben Jonson's, c so 
rammed with life.' " " I find him a better 
teacher of rhetoric than any modern. His 
superstitions are poetic, aspiring, affirmative. 
A poet might rhyme all day with hints 
drawn from Plutarch." " His faith in the 
immortality of the soul is another measure 
of his deep humanity. . . . He believes that 
the doctrine of the Divine Providence and 
that of the immortality of the soul rest on 
one and the same basis," — as did Emerson 
himself. 

Emerson early came to love Plato, and 
after leaving college and all through his 
life studied him closely. " Plato," says Dr. 
Holmes, "comes nearest to being his idol, 
Shakespeare next." "Out of Plato," he 
said, " came all things that are still written 
and debated among men of thought. The 



Emerson and Carlyle 253 

work of Plato is that writing which, in the 
history of civilization, is entitled to Omar's 
account of the Koran, when he said, c Burn the 
libraries ; for, if they contain anything good, 
it is contained in this book/ " " Why," he 
asks, "should not young men be educated 
in this book [Plato] ? It would suffice for 
the tuition of the race ! " " Read Plato's 
c Republic ' ! Read Plato's < Republic ' ! 
Read Plato's c Republic ' ! " he repeated to 
one young man. "He lifts man toward the 
divine, and I like it when I hear that a man 
reads Plato. I want to meet that man " ; 
as he used similarly to say that he felt like 
embracing men who loved Horace. But 
" Plato," wrote Emerson of Carlyle at 
Craigenputtock, " he does not read, and he 
disparaged Socrates." Later, however, Car- 
lyle studied Plato, and his political views 
were directly influenced by him. " I re- 
member when Emerson first came to see 
me, that he had a great deal to say about 
Plato that was very attractive, and I began 
to look up Plato ; but amid the endless 
dialectical hair-splitting was generally com- 
pelled to shut up the book and say, c How 



254 The Influence of Emerson 

does all this concern me at all ? ' But later 
on I have read Plato with much pleasure, 
finding him an elevated soul, spreading a 
pure atmosphere around one as he reads " ; 
and then he proceeds to quote, with great 
relish, Plato's beratings of Cleon, the shoe- 
maker, for meddling with politics, and the 
rest of his scorn of the Athenian democracy. 
The Neo-Platonists were always favorites 
with Emerson, — Plotinus and the rest ; and 
he was a great reader of Swedenborg and 
the mystics. He placed Swedenborg among 
the five poets whom he recognized as defy- 
ing the powers of destruction, — Homer, 
Dante, Shakespeare, Swedenborg, and 
Goethe. Of Dante's power to embody 
his own life and time in highest poetry 
Emerson wrote the most striking words 
which have been written ; but his general 
use of Dante is not important — while 
Carlyle spoke the first adequate word of 
appreciation of Dante in modern England. 
Emerson specially valued the bibles of the 
race and such authors as Epictetus, Thomas 
a Kempis, and Pascal. The highest class 
of books, he said, are those which express 



Emerson and Carlyle 255 

the moral element; the next, works of 
the imagination ; and the next, works of 
science. " There is a mental power and 
creation, ,, he says in one place, "more ex- 
cellent than anything which is commonly 
called philosophy and literature." The 
high poets, as Homer, Milton, and Shake- 
speare, " do not fully content us." They 
" do not offer us heavenly bread " ; and the 
true poetry is to be found in Zoroaster and 
Plato, Saint John and Menu, " with their 
moral burdens." Above all is the Bible, 
most original and most profound. " People 
imagine that the place which the Bible holds 
in the world it owes to miracles. It owes 
it simply to the fact that it came out of 
a profounder depth of thought than any 
other book, and the effect must be pre- 
cisely proportionate." " Gibbon fancied that 
it was combinations of circumstances that 
gave Christianity its place in history ; but 
in nature it takes an ounce to balance an 
ounce." " The most wonderful words I 
ever heard of being uttered by man," said 
Carlyle, " are those in the four Evangelists, 
by Jesus of Nazareth. Their intellectual 



256 The Influence of Emerson 

talent is hardly inferior to their moral." 
"Our divinest symbol," he said, "is Jesus 
of Nazareth and his life and what followed 
therefrom ; higher has the human thought 
not yet reached." Jesus, said Emerson, 
" alone in all history estimated the greatness 
of man." 

Both men were lovers of history, rever- 
encers, with all that was prophetic in them, 
of the past and its great lessons. Carlyle 
was the greatest historian in the England of 
his time. He wrote wise essays upon " Biog- 
raphy," "History," and "History Again," 
and devoted to history his last public 
utterance. " History " is the subject of the 
first essay in Emerson's first series of es- 
says ; and the first word sounds his key- 
note of interpretation. One of his earliest 
and most important lecture courses was one 
— twelve lectures — upon the " Philosophy 
of History." He had the highest qualities 
of the historian. Judge Hoar's tribute to 
his historical address on Concord as " the 
most complete and exquisite picture of the 
origin, history, and peculiar characteristics 
of a New England town that has ever been 



Emerson and Carlyle 257 

produced " was a just tribute. There are 
no lines which throw more illuminating light 
than his upon every period of our American 
history, — the Colonial period, the period of 
the Revolution, and the period of the Anti- 
slavery struggle and the Civil War. 

Both men were students of the individual. 
In reading history, Emerson said, the stu- 
dent is to " prefer the history of individ- 
uals." He gives lists of the autobiographies 
and table-talks which he loves, the books 
which bring the student close to the heart of 
the great actors of a period. He prized the 
works of Ben Jonson as "a sort of hoop" 
to bind all the Elizabethan men together 
and to England. Biography is the only 
history, Carlyle said: history is chiefly the 
record of what the great men in the world 
have done. Emerson was not a hero-wor- 
shipper in the Carlylian sense. History 
is all in me, he said, — in every man. The 
foundation idea of his interpretation of his- 
tory is that there is one mind common to 
all individual men. Carlyle writes of Hero- 
worship, Emerson of the Uses of Great 
Men. The great man is the useful man, 



258 The Influence of Emerson 

the greatest man the best servant. " Self- 
trust," he said, "is the essence of heroism. " 
" That which takes my fancy most in the 
heroic class," he says, "is the good humor 
and hilarity they exhibit." This is true of 
some of the heroic, but it is not true of 
others. " Times of heroism," as he recog- 
nizes, " are generally times of terror " ; and 
the hero of the terror must be sad and 
stern. " Emerson's ideal," says John Bur- 
roughs, " is always the scholar, the man of 
books and ready wit ; Carlyle's hero is a 
riding or striding ruler or a master worker 
in some active field." Yet we criticise these 
generalizations almost as fast as we make 
them, and file the crowding exceptions. 
We think of Carlyle's tribute to the literary 
life as the most fortunate and influential 
life, in his essay on Voltaire ; and Emerson 
mentions Napoleon, generally in praise of 
some energetic quality, oftener than he 
mentions anybody else save Shakespeare, 
oftener than Plato, Plutarch, or Goethe, who 
stand next in order. It is illuminating to 
compare Emerson's " Representative Men " 
and the subjects of his early biographical 



Emerson and Carlyle 259 

lectures, Michael Angelo, Milton, Luther, 
George Fox, and Edmund Burke, with the 
men whom Carlyle chooses to represent 
his sundry heroisms. With the early bi- 
ographical course he gave an introductory 
lecture on "The Tests of Great Men," 
corresponding to the lecture on " The 
Uses of Great Men," which introduced 
the course on " Representative Men." The 
two write often of the same men, — Napo- 
leon, Goethe, Shakespeare, — but differently. 
Carlyle is always the advocate or prose- 
cutor ; Emerson is judicial, and we feel a 
kind of finality in what he says. Napo- 
leon's case cannot be reopened. There is 
in Emerson's page always a certain spirit of 
superiority to the man he writes of; but we 
find that this is born of his identification of 
himself with humanity, his taking of his 
reader into partnership, and the judgment 
appears no more his than ours as we read. 
To Carlyle common mankind is a mere 
flock of sheep, and the main thing is to 
find good " bell-wethers " for the " dull 
host." To Emerson " all men are wise ; 
the difference is in art." " The great are 



160 The Influence of Emerson 

our better selves, ourselves with advan- 
tages/ ' the men who are able to express 
more clearly some idea which others also 
accept, and the homage paid them is 
" anything but humiliation ; it is men's ex- 
pression of their hope of what they shall 
become when the obstructions of their mal- 
formation and mal-education shall be trained 
away." 

Right here is the ground of the main 
differences between Carlyle and Emerson. 
Here Carlyle goes to despotism, — a despot- 
ism, albeit, based in a searching radicalism 
and rooted in most human sympathies, a 
despotism of brains, loving the people and 
having no respect for the "dignities and a' 
that," a despotism a thousand times more 
democratic than all Whiggism, — and Em- 
erson is the stanch republican. No one 
could characterize Carlyle's politics better 
than Emerson himself: "Young men, es- 
pecially those holding liberal opinions, press 
to see him, but he treats them with con- 
tempt ; they profess freedom, and he stands 
for slavery ; they praise republics, and he 
likes the Russian czar; they admire Cob- 



Emerson and Carlyle 261 

den and free trade, and he is a protectionist 
in political economy; they praise moral 
suasion, he goes for murder, money, capital 
punishment, and other pretty abominations 
of English law ; they wish freedom of the 
press, and he thinks the first thing he would 
do, if he got into Parliament, would be to 
turn out the reporters and stop all manner 
of mischievous speaking to Buncombe and 
wind-bags ; they go for free institutions, for 
letting things alone, and only giving oppor- 
tunity and motive to every man, he for a 
stringent government, that shows people 
what they must do, and makes them do it." 
Carlyle really never thought himself out 
in politics. He railed, — and that is easy, — 
and he had plenty to rail at: the faithful 
and hopeful democrat is as conscious as he 
of the defects of democracy. But he sug- 
gested no method by which his benevolent 
despot could be made a despot in this mod- 
ern world, or kept benevolent, or secured a 
benevolent successor; and he would have 
railed at any method which any man had 
ventured to suggest. Some glimmering of 
a better way painfully evolving in humanity 



262 The Influence of Emerson 

he curiously confesses to Emerson himself 
in one of his last letters (1871): "In my 
occasional explosions against Anarchy, and 
my inextinguishable hatred of it, I privately 
whisper to myself: Could any Friedrich 
Wilhelm now, or Friedrich, or most per- 
fect Governor you could hope to realize, 
guide forward what is America's essential 
task at present faster or more completely 
than c Anarchic America ' is now doing? 
Such c Anarchy ' has a great deal to say for 
itself." * 

* " Emerson's high and transparent sanity, among other things, 
kept him in line with the ruling tendencies of his age, and his teach- 
ing brings all the aid that abstract teaching can towards the solution 
of the moral problems of modern societies. Carlyle chose to fling 
himself headlong and blindfold athwart the great currents of things, 
against all the forces and elements that are pushing modern societies 
forward. Beginning in his earlier work with the same faith as Emer- 
son in leading instincts, he came to dream that the only leading in- 
stinct worth thinking about is that of self-will, mastery, force and 
violent strength. Emerson was for basing the health of a modern 
commonwealth on the only real strength, and the only kind of force 
that can be relied upon, namely, the honest, manly, simple and 
emancipated character of the citizen. This gives to his doctrine a 
hold and a prize on the work of the day, and makes him our helper. 
Carlyle's perverse reaction had wrecked and stranded him when the 
world came to ask him for direction. In spite of his resplendent 
genius, he had no direction to give, and was only able in vague and 
turbid torrents of words to hide a shallow and obsolete lesson." 
John Morley. 



Emerson and Carlyle 263 

" Emerson told me once," says Edward 
Everett Hale, "that when, in the winter of 
1848, he left Liverpool for America, Arthur 
Hugh Clough, the young poet, accompanied 
him to the ship, and walked the deck with 
him until she sailed. Clough was sad for 
his departure. He said : c You leave all 
of us young Englishmen without a leader. 
Carlyle has led us into the desert, and he 
has left us there/ Emerson said to him, 
c That is what all young men in England 
have said to me ' ; and he placed his hand 
on Clough's head, and said, c I ordain you 
Bishop of all England, to go up and down 
among all the young men, and lead them 
into the promised land/ Alas ! " comments 
Dr. Hale, " Clough was not one of the 
leaders of men : rather a listener and a fol- 
lower. And the young men of England 
and America were left to the greater lesson 
of the Master of Life, — that every life must 
for itself drink from the infinite Fountain. 
The days of chieftains, of proconsuls, of 
dukes and barons are gone by ; the day of 
the boss and the magician was over when 
the Master of Life spoke the Word. The 



264 The Influence of Emerson 

kingdom of heaven is open to each man 
who will thunder at the door. The king- 
dom of heaven suffers violence ; and the 
sturdy and persevering, and only they, are 
those who take it by force." 

Emerson believed in the people, in the 
present and in progress. Carlyle painted 
the tombs of the prophets, but too often 
stoned the prophets sent to his generation. 
He would very likely have been much pes- 
tered by Cromwell and his Puritans if he 
had lived in London then ; and he might 
have told Luther, if he had heard his ham- 
mer whacking on the door of Wittenberg 
church, amidst the rabblement, that he had 
better be attending to " the duty that lay 
nearest him." He failed to see Mazzini's 
vision, and to divine that he had the truest 
political prophet of the age to his neighbor, 
while walking in and out with him every 
day. Emerson was the universal man, to 
whom past and present, history and the 
newspaper, were the same. " 'Tis wonder- 
ful," he writes in 1864, "what sublime les- 
sons I have once and again read on the bul- 
letin boards in the streets ! " His perception 



Emerson and Carlyle 16 $ 

of the good was immediate ; and he knew 
John Brown for a hero while the musketry 
was rattling at Harpers Ferry as truly as 
the men of Concord Bridge whose shot had 
been heard round the world and been ap- 
plauded all along the line. Emerson be- 
lieved in America and the republic, in its 
opportunity and power ; and we go to him to 
feed our patriotism. " To him more than 
to all other causes together," Lowell has 
said, with great boldness, perhaps, and think- 
ing of the Harvard heroes, " did the young 
martyrs of our civil war owe the sustaining 
strength of thoughtful heroism that is so 
touching in every record of their lives." 
Yet we must remember that, if Carlyle's 
pages are not calculated to stir the patriotism 
of Englishmen, there was little that was 
admirable in the social and political condi- 
tions of the England to which it was his 
lot to address himself. We do not go to 
Emerson's addresses on slavery to warm pur 
love of country ; and had Emerson been 
born, like Carlyle, into the midst of the 
c< morgue of aristocracy," his speech there 
would often have taken the form of a Lat- 
ter-day Pamphlet. 



i66 The Influence of Emerson 

Here, too, in this root view of human 
nature, is the ground of such pessimism as 
there is in Carlyle and of Emerson's com- 
plete optimism. There is none of Carlyle's 
despair in Emerson. All evil is to him a 
temporary lack of harmony ; and there is 
always at work in the affairs of the world 
a power which compels men to be just, so 
that what is useful and right will last, and 
what is bad and hurtful will sink. There 
is a law always working to make the best 
better and the worst good. Moral deformity 
itself is good passion out of place. cc Nature 
is upheld by antagonism. Passions, resist- 
ance, danger, are educators. We acquire 
the strength we have overcome." Law is 
the highest method of freedom. No evil 
ever escapes unpunished. Crime and pun- 
ishment grow out of one stem ; but all work 
together for the universal good. This faith 
in the universal good grew with Emerson as 
he grew older ; and hence the ever-deepen- 
ing serenity and trust which made his last 
days best. It was the faith in Providence. 
" I have heard prayers," — he asked his 
readers in the cc Sovereignty of Ethics," his 



Emerson and Carlyle 267 

last great religious utterance, whether they 
had never had occasion to say this to them- 
selves, — " I have prayed, even ; but I have 
never until now dreamed that this undertak- 
ing the entire management of my own affairs 
was not commendable. I have never seen, 
until now, that it dwarfed me. I have not 
discovered, until this blessed ray flashed just 
now through my soul, that there dwelt any 
power in nature that would relieve me of my 
load. But now I see." It is in the persist- 
ent, consistent faith in the soul, in man, in 
progress, and in the reliable omnipotence 
of the good, that Emerson's superiority to 
Carlyle consists. This is the faith that sus- 
tains and inspires, and this alone that can 
do it constantly. 

It is bad to be with Carlyle habitually. 
It is bad not to have Emerson always on 
the table. He is a civilizer. His reverence 
for man as man begat the gentlest manners 
and the most delicate deference to all. He 
rebukes our rudeness, hurry, and self-asser- 
tion by the mere thought of him, while 
Carlyle often feeds them. " He is a born 
gentleman," said Frederika Bremer. He 



268 The Influence of Emerson 

was the perfect gentleman for the same 
reason that he was the perfect republican. 
We should laugh at an essay from Carlyle 
on Manners, kind as that great heart was 
in its innermost, and fine his courtesy when 
he bethought himself. He was boisterous, 
obtrusive often and rude, breaking every 
rule of etiquette, perhaps, every twenty- 
four hours. He was forgetful of others, 
careless too often, if comfortable himself, 
whether others were comfortable or no, 
careless how much he might disturb the 
peace and happiness of others by the vain 
and ineffectual ventilation of his own mis- 
eries. He was doubtless an uncomfortable 
man to live with, much of the time ; and 
the loneliness and hardships to which Mrs. 
Carlyle was subjected during those long 
years at Craigenputtock, with the pans and 
kettles, and with no "immensities" or "eter- 
nities " of her own, to speak of, to cheer her 
up, were certainly severe. Thoughtlessness ? 
Yes ; but it was mournful thoughtlessness, 
and perhaps the remorse of " Reminiscen- 
ces " was scarcely too severe an atonement 
for this and some of the London matters, — 



Emerson and Carlyle 269 

although too much has been heard of all 
this, and the gossip has done gross wrong to 
Carlyle and to the truth. 

Emerson was by far the rounder man, 
more-sided. A many-sided man it is not 
just to call Carlyle. Of prodigious knowl- 
edge, writing on many subjects, these are 
chiefly in a few directions, circling round 
and illustrating a few great ideas. Man, in 
his history and destiny and literature, was 
what exclusively held Carlyle' s attention ; 
and history and society he approached with 
serious limitations. That quick and loving 
interest in nature which breathes in all of 
Emerson's pages, and of which his poetry 
especially is so largely an expression, we look 
for in vain in Carlyle. Nor was his interest 
in Art greater. Such interest as appears is 
the interest rather of the student of history, 
who must take account of art as of politics 
or of pauperism. " I was at the Museum 
a week ago seeking pictures [for the French 
Revolution] ; found none ; but got a sight of 
Albert Diirer and (I find) some shadow of 
his old teutscheri) deep, still soul, which was 
well worth the getting." It is an interest in 



270 The Influence of Emerson 

the man, not the artist, — as he was interested 
in portraits of John Knox. He would 
probably have been equally interested in one 
of Holbein's Henries and in the Mona Lisa. 
We should like to know what he was chiefly 
thinking about as he wandered with Emer- 
son, on that Stonehenge day, through Wilton 
Hall, among the pictures and the statues, 
" to which Carlyle, catalogue in hand, did all 
too much justice." He should have been 
interested in art, if only to have written 
adequately on the man, Michael Angelo. 
There is nothing that he did not give us 
which we should have liked so well, unless 
it be the Life of Luther. In Emerson's 
study there was only one large picture, a 
copy of Michael Angelo's " Fates." We 
should have looked for this with Carlyle, 
perhaps, and here rather for the " Trans- 
figuration " or the Parthenon. But do not 
we see on second thought that it was in its 
proper home, and that its prominence was 
proper ? " The moral sentiment in us is 
inspiration ; out there in Nature we see its 
fatal strength. ... The dice are loaded ; the 
globe is a battery, because every atom is a 



Emerson and Carlyle 271 

magnet ; and the police and sincerity of the 
universe are secured by God's delegating 
his divinity to every particle ; there is no 
room for hypocrisy, no margin for choice. 
. . . The book of Nature is the book of 
Fate. ... If we give it the high sense in 
which the poets used it, even thought itself 
is not above Fate ; that, too, must act ac- 
cording to eternal laws." Emerson would 
have been most likely to have given us the 
adequate essay on " the hand that rounded 
Peter's dome, ,, — as that hand, writing upon 
Fate, would have fixed its relation to free- 
dom just as Emerson fixed it. Indeed, 
Emerson did lecture upon Michael Angelo, 
— it was, I think, the first biographical 
lecture he ever gave. In inculcating self- 
reliance, he appeals to Michael Angelo's 
course, — " to confide in one's self and be 
something of worth and value " ; and both 
in prose and verse he celebrates his divine 
inspiration : " Michael Angelo is largely 
filled with the Creator that made and makes 
men." " Himself from God he could not 
free." " It is almost a test by which the 
finest people I have ever known might be 



272 The Influence of Emerson 

selected," he writes to Herman Grimm, — 
" their interest in Michael Angelo and his 
friends, Vittoria Colonna in chief." He 
corresponds enthusiastically with Margaret 
Fuller about Michael Angelo and Raphael. 
The Boston Athenaeum — "on whose sunny 
roof and beautiful chambers," writes Emer- 
son, " may the benediction of centuries of 
students rest with mine " — had then just 
added to its library a small collection of 
plaster casts, Michael Angelo's "Day" and 
" Night " among them, and a good number 
of engravings of the works of the French 
and Italian masters. " Here was old Greece 
and old Italy brought bodily to New Eng- 
land, and a verification given to all our 
dreams and readings." But Emerson has 
not written so wisely or with so much in- 
spiration on painting and sculpture as on 
poetry : we could wish that, when embalm- 
ing Guercino in song, he had written another 
name instead, and such like ; yet upon the 
general principles of all true art what other 
American has written essays comparable in 
luminousness and stimulation with his ? 
Carlyle doubted whether Art, in the old 



Emerson and Carlyle 273 

Greek and Italian sense, were possible for 
men in this era. "Were not perhaps the 
founder of a religion our true Homer at 
present ? " he asked. " The whole soul 
must be illuminated, made harmonious." 
" I will try for Winckelmann," he said 
again ; " but in my heterodox heart there 
is yearly growing up the strangest, crabbed, 
one-sided persuasion, that art is but a remi- 
niscence now : that for us in these days 
prophecy (well understood), not poetry, is 
the thing wanted. How can we sing and 
paint when we do not yet believe and see P " 
There is deep truth here. Art in the an- 
tique sense has seemed almost impossible in 
this age. There is little which the sculptors 
or the painters have done in these days in 
England or America which really expresses 
the earnest or actual mind of the time, or 
will ever be hunted up as evidence. Pictures 
of buttercups and sunsets and the full moon 
cannot do it, although the love of nature is 
perennially welcome in painting, as in poetry ; 
nor the yards of battles with which Berlin 
hangs its walls, and with which — records of 
reaction, obscuration, and anachronism — 



274 The Influence of Emerson 

New York and London may hang theirs to- 
morrow ; nor portraits of the dangerous little 
idle classes, manikins to carry silk and 
velvet that will stand the microscope. The 
art clubs have seemed fated to be dilettant, 
seemed rather suffocating places, which 
should be scented with jockey club and fur- 
nished carefully with chaste correctness, 
though with stuffed chairs. Their air has 
been as impossible for the people to breathe 
as the air of a Fifth Avenue church ; and 
the people have not breathed it, — only the 
indulged and fortunate have breathed it. 
Our art has not been for the people : our 
paintings have not been published, like our 
books, but parlored, and so calculated for 
the parlor. Not appealing and not able to 
appeal to the people, it has not reflected the 
people's life nor had roots in it. New Eng- 
land sent a roomful of pictures to represent 
her at the World's Fair. They did not 
represent her: no visitor could have told 
whether they came from Boston or Brittany. 
The student of New England by and by will 
turn back to the stories of Mrs. Stowe and 
Mrs. Cooke and Miss Wilkins and Miss 



Emerson and Carlyle 275 

Jewett, to Sumner's orations and Parker's 
sermons, to the <c Biglow Papers " and 
Whittier's ballads and Emerson, — but not 
to the painters ; for there is nothing indige- 
nous and authentic there, nothing reporting 
life. Boston — the Puritan capital, the 
cradle of liberty, the freer of slaves, the 
home of historians, the centre of our golden 
age of poetry and letters — rears her temple 
of culture ; and no canvas or marble on the 
walls to show that the foundations are not in 
Birmingham or Bordeaux or Bologna. It 
is not an answer to say that culture tran- 
scends patriotism and provincialism : a great 
civic life is not a provincialism, and the 
inspirations of the nation are a cardinal 
factor in all vital education and public expe- 
rience. The answer is that art with us is 
still exotic — as likewise in Carlyle's Eng- 
land and Scotland. It was not so in Nu- 
remberg and Venice and Florence and 
Athens. The painter and the sculptor told 
of life, of what was in the popular heart. 
Their work was as public as that of the 
tragedians and the orators, and profited like 
theirs from the public stricture and the pub- 



276 The Influence of Emerson 

lie praise ; and so they, too, are among 
the historians, — exponents and chroniclers 
of the times. The fault is not with our 
artists ; the fault is with ourselves. Carlyle 
was right. The problem of art is the prob- 
lem of social regeneration. When our so- 
ciety believes and sees, then the artist will 
match the new life with his larger and braver 
work. That the braver and larger works 
have multiplied in England and America ; 
that the public opportunity and craving come; 
that, even as Carlyle wrote, Ruskin, his own 
disciple, wrote also ; that William Morris has 
lived and lives, — these are encouragements 
and warrants for the faith that broader and 
better social visions and ideals are multiply- 
ing, too. 

Carlyle doubted whether Poetry itself is 
sincere in these days, and he inveighed 
against it in many of his friends. He 
inveighed against it in Emerson himself, 
and clearly never had any true apprecia- 
tion of the beauty and worth of Emerson's 
poetry. " I did gain, though under impedi- 
ments, a real satisfaction, and some tone of 
the Eternal Melodies sounding afar off. . . . 



Emerson and Carlyle 277 

But indeed you are very perverse." Really 
he pities Emerson, and scorns him a little, 
for wasting his time on poetry. Yet he was 
himself truly a poet, — " with the gift of 
song," says Mr. Lowell, "he would have 
been the greatest of epic poets since Homer"; 
and the subjects of his great " Cromwell " and 
" French Revolution " epics have as central 
place in the history of the modern world 
as the siege of Troy had to the Greeks. 
Curiously enough, we find him asking in his 
journal, many years before he went to Lon- 
don: "Were the true history (had we any 
such, or even generally any dream of such) 
the true epic poem ? I partly begin to sur- 
mise so." And, while he is beginning at 
" The French Revolution," he writes, 
" Gleams, too, of a work of art hover 
past me, — as if this should be a work of 
art." Writing to Emerson himself at this 
time, he said that " it was part of his creed 
that history is poetry, could we tell it 
right," — which is true, as Emerson's cor- 
relative, that " our best history is still 
poetry," is true also, and more obviously 
and immediately true. The structural feel- 



278 The Influence of Emerson 

ing was always powerful in Carlyle ; and 
" Past and Present," " Sartor," and the 
greater essays, no less than " The French 
Revolution," which is indeed a work of 
art, are carefully proportioned, and every 
member has its proper place. An essay of 
Carlyle's always remains a moving picture in 
the mind, while Emerson's essays, perfect 
in each sentence, have to most neither 
beginning, end, nor middle. Like " a bag 
of duck shot " we have noticed that Carlyle 
called them ; and he somewhere spoke of 
them as like an army all made up of gen- 
erals or captains. Emerson himself defended 
this lack of scheme in writing ; and the way 
in which his lectures and essays grew and 
were put together has often been described. 
" You should start with no skeleton or 
plan," he said to the Williams student. 
" The natural one will grow as you work. 
Knock away all scaffolding. Neither have 
exordium nor peroration." Yet in another 
mood, clearly in self-criticism, he writes : 
"If Minerva offered me a gift and an 
option, I would say, Give me continuity. I 
am tired of scraps." In truth, the essays 



Emerson and Carlyle 279 

differ much in degree of method and 
system, and most of them are far more 
logical in their arrangement than it is fash- 
ionable for folk who do not closely study 
them to say. Dr. Harris has published a 
careful analysis of " Experience/' to show 
how much can be said for its logical and 
orderly process. That essay is but a frag- 
ment, and there are others where the ana- 
lyst would fare worse ; but there are also oth- 
ers where he would fare quite as well. Mr. 
Chadwick has pointed out the peculiarly 
beautiful development and order of the 
Harvard address, which is perhaps cast more 
completely in one mould than any other 
single lecture or essay. It is only as we live 
long with Emerson that we see his funda- 
mental logic and consistency, below all sur- 
face varieties, in his pervading and control- 
ling ideas. " I am not careful," he says him- 
self, in serene trust in the deep logic of his 
life, " to see how my thoughts comport with 
other thoughts and other moods, — I trust 
them for that, — any more than how any one 
minute of the year is related to any other 
remote minute, — which yet I know is so 



280 The Influence of Emerson 

related." He is logical as the landscape is 
logical, consistent as the earth is consistent, 
in whose common soil are rooted, asking 
no consent of each other, the lily and the 
rose, the oak-tree and the pine, and herbs 
great and small, wherein birds of a hun- 
dred species nest and sing. 

Emerson is much more the poet than 
Carlyle, perhaps all poet, in essays and in 
verse alike. " I am born a poet," he 
wrote to Miss Jackson, adding in humil- 
ity, " of a low class without doubt, yet a 
poet : that is my nature and vocation " ; 
and to Miss Peabody he said the same : 
" I am not a great poet, but whatever is of 
me is a poet." Parker said, using almost 
Lowell's words upon Carlyle, that Emerson 
is a poet lacking the accomplishment of 
verse ; and he made merry with Emerson's 
rhymes. But this is shallow, as most criti- 
cism like Arnold's on Emerson's poetry is 
shallow. In every seeming awkwardness 
we grow to find a wondrous strength and 
a wondrous fitness, and should shrink from 
a word that was simply of correcter length. 
Poets know poets ; and every one of our 



Emerson and Carlyle 281 

greater American poets has borne witness to 
Emerson as the greatest of their company. 
Holmes and Stedman have made the argu- 
ment. Howells has said that Emerson, more 
perhaps than any other modern poet, gives 
the notion of inspiration ; and truly, if any- 
thing in poetry ever rolled out of the heart 
of nature, thence came " The Problem/' 
"Woodnotes," and "Each and All." No 
other American poetry teaches truth so 
profound as Emerson's. No poems — not 
Wordsworth's — have ever taken us so to 
the deep secrets of the woods and earth and 
sky as Emerson's poems of nature. None 
either are in so profound harmony with the 
modern philosophy of nature or have given 
it such fitting and synthetic voice. Carlyle 
was in small sympathy with modern science, 
— coupled Darwinism with atheism; but 
Emerson's genius anticipated and calmly 
mastered all. "In him," says Tyndall, 
" we have a poet and a profoundly relig- 
ious man, who is really and entirely un- 
daunted by the discoveries of science, 
past, present and prospective. In his case, 
poetry, with the joy of a bacchanal, takes her 



282 The Influence of Emerson 

graver brother, science, by the hand, and 
cheers him with immortal laughter. By 
Emerson scientific conceptions are con- 
tinually transmuted into the finer forms 
and warmer lines of an ideal world/' 

Emerson is always definite and clear, — 
Hellenic ; Carlyle is Hebraic, turgid and 
often ambiguous, — and there are Carlylians 
of the right and left wings and centre. The 
difference between the men is the difference 
— to use words, otherwise applied, of Emer- 
son's own — between serene sunshine and 
lurid stormlights. Yet deeper than all dif- 
ferences, as both knew well, are the like- 
nesses. Lowell speaks, in the " Fable for 
Critics," of the 

. . . " persons, mole-blind to the soul's make and 

style, 
Who insist on a likeness 'twixt E. and Carlyle." 

But Lowell said many things in the 
" Fable for Critics " more smart than true, 
as he would doubtless be quickest to own, — 
not careful to trim the sentiment to a nicety, 
if the words jingled well. The likeness be- 
tween Emerson and Carlyle was profound, 



Emerson and Carlyle i%$ 

extending to the root conceptions and pur- 
poses of life, while the diversities were much 
more superficial. " Their effects upon the 
mind," says John Burroughs, with a high 
degree of truth, " are essentially the same ; 
both have the c tart cathartic virtue ' of 
courage and self-reliance ; both nourish char- 
acter and spur genius. Carlyle does not 
communicate the gloom he feels ; 'tis the 
most tonic despair to be found in literature/' 
Yet there were never more striking differ- 
ences between two men, and some of these 
are tbuched with acute discrimination in 
Lowell's familiar lines.* 

* The books abound with parallelisms bringing out the likenesses 
and contrasts between the two; and the deductions and additions to 
which each of us is impelled in every case witness to the vitality and 
various impressive aspects of their thought. Says Whipple, in his 
essay on "Emerson and Carlyle," one of his three valuable essays 
relating to Emerson: " Emerson was the champion of the Ideal; Car- 
lyle asserted the absolute dominion of fact. Emerson declared that 
Truth is mighty, and will prevail ; Carlyle retorted that truth is mighty, 
and has prevailed. Emerson looked serenely at the ugly aspect of 
contemporary life, because, as an optimist, he was a herald of the 
Future; Carlyle, as a pessimist, denounced the Present, and threw all 
the energy of his vivid dramatic genius into vitalizing the Past. Emer- 
son was a prophet ; Carlyle, a resurrectionist. Emerson gloried in what 
was to be ; Carlyle exulted in what had been. Emerson declared, even 
when current events appeared ugliest to the philanthropist, that ' the 
highest thought and the deepest love is born with victory on his head,' 



284 The Influence of Emerson 

Emerson is " sweetness and light " become 
flesh and dwelling among us. " What can 
you say of Carlyle," said Ruskin, " but that 
he was born in the clouds and struck by 
lightning ? " Carlyle is sometimes half mad- 
man ; Emerson is always sane and sanity- 
strengthening. Carlyle was Essene, and 
Emerson was Stoic ; but the Stoic loved 
Hymettus and Ilissus better than the Porch, 
and the Essene loved Jerusalem more than 
Jordan. Carlyle was in many ways least 
human, and yet needed men the most, was 
most dependent on society and books, had 
least resources in himself. Both were hu- 
morists. Emerson, with his Yankee shrewd- 
ness, laughed quietly to himself at Brook 
Farm, religiously as he respected it, and in 
secret moods, doubtless, enjoyed as much as 
Hawthorne the succotash of philosopher 

and must triumph in the end; Carlyle, gloomily surveying the pres- 
ent, insisted that high thought and deep love must be sought and 
found in generations long past, which Dr. Dryasdust had so covered up 
with his mountains of mud that it was only by immense toil that he 
[Carlyle] had been able to reproduce them as they actually existed. 
Look up, says Emerson, cheerily; ' hitch your wagon to a star'; look 
down, growls Carlyle, * and see that your wagon is an honest one, 
safe and strong in passing over miry roads, before you have the impu- 
dence to look up to the smallest star in the rebuking heavens.' " 



Emerson and Carlyle 285 

and cabbage and Margaret Fuller's " tran- 
scendental heifer " ; and Carlyle's sense of 
the ridiculous always saved him from the 
final catastrophe, made his prophesying so 
much the better, and, by setting him outside 
himself, enabled him to become the artist, 
too. Both were great conversationalists. 
"Thomas Carlyle," said Emerson, "is even 
more extraordinary in his conversation than 
in his writing." " Emerson's conversation," 
says Mr. Conway, "was unequalled by that 
of any person I have ever met with, unless it 
be Thomas Carlyle." But Emerson needed 
the stimulus of sympathetic minds to draw 
him out, and was more ready to listen than 
to speak ; while Carlyle was a haranguer, like 
Coleridge, whom he ridiculed. " You can- 
not interrupt him," Margaret Fuller found. 
" If you get a chance to remonstrate for a 
moment, he raises his voice and bears you 
down," — which to Margaret Fuller must 
certainly have been severe. Both men were, 
by training and nature, scholars, loving quiet 
and not noise, yet both compelled by the 
needs of the time to enter the social arena 
and become leaders of reform. " Carlyle 



286 The Influence of Emerson 

thinks it the only question for wise men/* 
wrote Emerson, " instead of art, and fine 
fancies, and poetry, and such things, to ad- 
dress themselves to the problem of society"; 
and Emerson's own lyre was hung up, when 
the national sin became rampant, until the 
nation's life was purified. 

It is foolish almost to ask which was 
the greater man, Carlyle or Emerson, 
and whose influence will endure the longer. 
It was an Englishman, Matthew Arnold, 
who said categorically, " Emerson's work is 
more important than Carlyle's." It was an 
Englishwoman, George Eliot, who said, " I 
have seen Emerson, the first man I have 
seen." She also said, as she read the warm 
words which Carlyle had written concerning 
Emerson, " This is a world worth abiding in 
while one man can thus venerate and love 
another." Carlyle was in many ways the 
more remarkable personality, made the 
greater sensation in the world. The im- 
pression which he made upon his time was 
probably deeper, as the effects of the great 
Mississippi flood upon the Louisiana low- 
lands were greater than the effects of the 



Emerson and Carlyle 287 

showers of a hundred Aprils, and will be 
talked of more by the next generation and 
the next. No such flood of reminiscences 
followed the death of Emerson as followed 
the death of Carlyle ; and fifty years from 
now Carlyle perhaps will be read the more. 
He will have revivals, — look out for one 
about this time, — and he will have eclipses. 
Emerson will have no eclipses : he shines 
with a steady light. Like Plato, he will 
have his dozen readers through the ages ; 
and for them his book will ever live, and 
they will be the teachers of the teachers. 

The great work which Carlyle and Emer- 
son did for their time, various as were the 
ways in which they did it, was essentially 
the same. It was not the literary work, for 
literary ends, — poetry, history, essays on 
Goethe and Napoleon and Montaigne. It 
was the work of social and spiritual renova- 
tion. It is as awakeners and inspirers, as 
preachers of self-reliance and individualism 
against the compliance, superstitions, grega- 
riousness and sham that were rusting out 
the world, as prophets of the soul, eternity, 
and God, the universal miracle, against 



288 The Influence of Emerson 

agnosticism, mechanical philosophy, and a 
utilitarian morality, that they will be chiefly 
remembered, and that, being dead, they 
speak. They were the great prophets for 
England and America of the new idealistic 
epoch in the world's thought and life in 
which we stand and which began with Kant 
in Germany. Philosopher in the pedant's 
or precisian's sense — system-maker, cos- 
mic pigeon-holer — neither Carlyle nor 
Emerson was, unless, indeed, Emerson, by 
virtue of the " Nature " essay and the lect- 
ures on the "Intellect," as " systematic " 
surely as Plato, may have earned that dis- 
tinction. Philosophers in the true and 
antique sense, lovers of the high wisdom 
and teachers of first principles to men, they 
were the greatest in the England and Amer- 
ica of their time. 

"Carlyle," says Mr. Froude, "was a Cal- 
vinist without the theology," — the Calvinis- 
tic theology. " Emerson," says Mr. Cooke, 
" was a Puritan, with all that is harsh, re- 
pulsive and uncomfortable in Puritanism 
removed." They were the Puritans of this 
time, the pure men and sincere. They 



Emerson and Carlyle 289 

threw man back on himself and God once 
more, instead of on the congregation and 
tradition. " I cannot find language of suf- 
ficient energy," said Emerson, "to convey 
my sense of the sacredness of private integ- 
rity." "The priest of the intellect" Alcott 
named him. Timely is it to recall the words 
in days of shuffling with the creeds, as all 
days seem to be. " If we had any vivacity 
of soul, and could get the old Hebrew 
spectacles off our nose," said Carlyle, in 
such days, "should we run to Judea or 
Houndsditch to look at the doings of the 
Supreme?" "It is in religion with us as 
in astronomy — we know now that the 
earth moves. But it has not annihilated 
the stars for us ; it has infinitely exalted 
and expanded the stars and universe." 
The circumscribing of God's energy to par- 
ticular places and periods was irreverence 
to Carlyle and Emerson. He is a living 
God, his Bible has no covers, and the only 
supernatural is the "natural supernatural." 
The gateway to divinity they knew to be 
humanity. "The true shekinah is man," 
Carlyle quotes fondly from Saint Chrysos- 



290 The Influence of Emerson 

torn, and adds, " Where else is the God's- 
Presence manifested not to our eyes only, 
but to our hearts, as in our fellow-man ? " 
The Christs are rooted where we are rooted. 
Jesus, said Emerson, was "true to what is in 
you and me ; " his life is the life of every 
faithful soul, " written large." Both Carlyle' 
and Emerson broke with the church of their 
day, the breach in Carlyle's case being 
wider than in Emerson's. " Do not imag- 
ine," he said, " that you can, by any 
hocus-pocus, distil astral spirits from the 
ruins of the old church." "The church," 
Emerson said, " is not large enough for the 
man ; in the churches every healthy and 
thoughtful mind finds itself checked, cribbed, 
confined." To no other do we owe it so 
much that this is not so true to-day. When 
Dean Stanley returned from America, wrote 
Mr. Conway in 1879, it was to report that 
religion had there passed through an evolu- 
tion from Edwards to Emerson, and that 
"the genial atmosphere which Emerson 
has done so much to promote is shared 
by all the churches equally." " There will 
be a new church," Emerson prophesied, 



Emerson and Carlyle 291 

"founded on moral science, at first cold 
and naked, a babe in the manger again, the 
algebra and mathematics of ethical law, the 
church of men to come, without shawms 
or psaltery or sackbut; but it will have 
heaven and earth for its beams and rafters ; 
science for symbol and illustration ; it will 
fast enough gather beauty, music, picture, 
poetry." Emerson was one of the founders 
of the Free Religious Association ; and he 
never stated his creed so tersely and well as 
in his second address to the Association. 
Looking to the future prophetically, he 
looked to the past, and especially to his 
Christian inheritance, reverently and grate- 
fully. He would have sung at eve with 
deeper feeling even than he sang at 
prime, — 

" We love the venerable house 
Our fathers built to God " ; 

and Christ and Christianity ever held to 
him the central place in human history. 
" The name of Jesus is not so much written 
as ploughed into the history of this world." 
He was glad to be called Christian, and 



ig2 The Influence of Emerson 

protested with sturdy sanity against splen- 
etic jealousy of the word because it had 
been prostituted to narrowness and super- 
stition. " I see no objection," he said, " to 
being called a Platonist, a Christian, or any 
other affirmative name, — and no good in 
negation " ; and, condemning finical and 
arbitrary criticisms, he said : " Always put 
the best interpretation on a tenet. Why 
not on Christianity ? " The protest which 
singles out Christ as the one leader in 
religion and thought to be denied his adjec- 
tive he saw to be as narrow as the supersti- 
tion which applies the term in some excep- 
tional and unnatural way ; but he would be 
Christian or Platonist in no way which did 
not always leave him first an Emersonian — 
himself — with no commanding allegiance 
save to God and truth. No irreverence ever 
drew from him words so severe as irrev- 
erence toward that great son of God to 
whom all the truly divine and religious 
souls of our portion of the race have looked 
back with highest veneration for highest 
inspiration. To Emerson, as to Carlyle, 
Jesus was the elder brother and supreme 



Emerson and Carlyle 293 

friend and aider of those who would 
live in the spirit. Most Hellenic of all 
great American minds, Greek philosophy 
can no more explain Emerson than it can 
explain Milton. Milton, defending the 
purity of his youth, declared that, " though 
Christianity had been but slightly taught 
him," yet a " certain reservedness of natural 
disposition and moral discipline, learned out 
of the noblest philosophy," had been enough 
to keep him from all that was ignoble and 
unclean. But to the antique heroism of the 
mature Milton there is added a new and 
deeper element. It was, as Emerson him- 
self said with such beautiful exactness, " the 
genius of the Christian sanctity " ; and, in 
saying it, Emerson paid tribute to that in 
Milton which we can pay tribute to in him- 
self in no other words so good as his : " Few 
men could be cited who have so well under- 
stood what is peculiar in the Christian ethics 
and the precise aid it has brought to men, in 
being an emphatic affirmation of the omnipo- 
tence of spiritual laws and, by way of mark- 
ing the contrast to vulgar opinions, laying 
its chief stress on humility. The indifFer- 



294 The Influence of Emerson 

ency of a wise mind to what is called high 
and low, and the fact that true greatness is 
a perfect humility, are revelations of Chris- 
tianity which he well understood. " The 
distinctive Christian element, although this 
not in respect of humility, is more pro- 
nounced in Milton than in Emerson ; but 
in no man since Milton have the Christian 
and the Greek been compounded in such 
harmony and fair proportion. Klopstock's 
" Messias " would have been endured by 
him less patiently perhaps than by Milton, 
although hardly less ; and both knew alike 
how, and how only, paradise is regained — 
or gained — by every Christ and every man. 
Both Emerson and Carlyle did much to 
destroy that grotesque exaggeration of Jesus 
as an unreal demigod and of Christianity as 
the absolute and only religion, which has 
delayed and hindered the legitimate and 
beautiful influence of both as sadly as 
capricious dogmas of infallibility and plenary 
inspiration have obscured the charm and 
virtue of the Christian scriptures ; they have 
both been potent forces in the reformation 
which is at last restoring to the Christian 



Emerson and Carlyle 295 

Church itself a real Bible and a real Christ, 
and lifting the religious world to a compre- 
hensive and worthy philosophy of history. 
If Carlyle sometimes went too far in his 
protest and impatience, it was because the 
Church's own sham and cant, inertia, and 
intellectual impiety compelled the extremest 
word of arrest and arousal. Emerson seldom 
went too far in aught, and never here. 

Carlyle and Emerson believed in a living 
God. " Through every star, through every 
grass-blade," says Carlyle, "and most through 
every living soul, the glory of a present God 
still beams." " The first simple foundation 
of my belief," said Emerson, " is that the 
Author of nature has not left himself without 
a witness in any sane mind : that the moral 
sentiment speaks to every man the law after 
which the universe was made." 

They believed in prayer, not as a means 
to effect a private end, the craving of a par- 
ticular commodity, — " as soon as the man 
is at one with God, he will not beg," — but 
as' communion with God. " As well," said 
Emerson, " might a child live without its 
mother's milk as a soul without prayer." 



296 The Influence of Emerson 

The first sermon which he ever preached 
was on Prayer; and prayer was the atmos- 
phere of his life. His paper on " Prayers " 
in the Dial is an impressive collection of 
passages showing wherein true prayer con- 
sists. He loved to write " at large leisure 
in noble mornings, opened by prayer or by 
readings of Plato " or others of the divine 
masters. He prayed before the Harvard 
address of 1838; and, in discussing late in 
life the question of morning prayer in the 
Harvard chapel, he said it secured to the 
young men "the opportunity of assuming 
once a day the noblest attitude man is 
capable of." " Prayer," said Carlyle to a 
young friend, in his latter days, " is and 
remains always a native and deepest impulse 
of the soul of man ; and, correctly gone 
about, is of the very highest benefit (nay, 
one might say, indispensability) to every 
man aiming morally high in this world. No 
prayer, no religion, or at least only a dumb 
and lamed one ! The modern hero ought 
not to give up praying, as he has latterly all 
but done. Prayer is the aspiration of our 
poor, struggling, heavy-laden soul towards 



Emerson and Carlyle 297 

its eternal Father ; and, with or without 
words, ought not to become impossible, nor, 
I persuade myself, need it ever. Loyal sons 
and subjects cati approach the King's throne 
who have no request to make there, except 
that they may continue loyal/' 

They believed in immortality. "What 
is excellent, as God lives, is permanent." 
Carlyle, it has been said, led us out of 
Egypt, but into the desert ; and the pessi- 
mists who claim him for their father say that 
the mistake of men is in thinking there is 
anything else than a desert. But Carlyle 
had been on Nebo, and caught the vision of 
what was beyond Jordan. " Know of a 
truth," he said, " that only the Time-shad- 
ows have perished or are perishable; that 
the real Being of whatever was, and what- 
ever is, and whatever will be, is even now 
and forever." " Everything is prospective," 
Emerson said, "and man is to live here- 
after. That the world is for his education 
is the only sane solution of the enigma." 
"When we accept joyfully the tide of being 
which floats us into the secrets of nature, 
and live and work with her, all unawares 



298 The Influence of Emerson 

the advancing soul has built and forged for 
itself a new condition, and the question and 
the answer are one." cc When we pro- 
nounce the name of man, we pronounce 
the belief of immortality. All great men 
find eternity affirmed in the very promise 
of their faculties. . . . The evidence from 
intellect is as valid as the evidence from 
love. The being that can share a thought 
and feeling so sublime as confidence of 
truth is no mushroom. Our dissatisfac- 
tion with any other solution is the blazing 
evidence of immortality. ,, 

What must this gospel — vital, vernacular, 
self-vouching, and not as of the scribes — 
not have meant, coming into the Puseyism 
and Simeonism and Jeffreyism and Whig- 
gism, the rust and dust, and " great and 
Thursday lecture " of sixty years ago ! 
Church, State, book, and man were gal- 
vanized and moribund. What was wanted 
was reality, shock, impulse, soul. Carlyle 
and Emerson came down as out of the sky 
at noon and troubled the stagnant waters, 
and there was life again. <c Emerson," says 
Lowell, " awakened us, saved us from the 



Emerson and Carlyle 299 

body of this death." " The works of two 
men," said Tyndall to the students of Lon- 
don University, " have placed me here 
to-day, — the English Carlyle and the Amer- 
ican Emerson. They told me what to do 
in a way that caused me to do it, and all 
my consequent intellectual action is to be 
traced to this purely moral source." He 
spoke for ten thousand men. 

Individualism, — that was the need of the 
time, as it is indeed the need of every time ; 
but perhaps it is not the greatest need of 
this time. The shuffling with the creeds 
goes on and will go on ; but it is seen to 
be poor business now, the business of pale 
and dilatory men, with whom the word of 
Kant and Lessing, of Channing and Parker, 
of Carlyle and Emerson, has not yet done its 
work. It will do its work. What we need 
to concern ourselves about is synthesis, re- 
organization, and advance. Indeed, is it not 
clear that true constructive elements are be- 
ginning in a hundred places to emerge, and 
that a time of faith and positive religion is 
nearer than many fears have augured to this 
distracted, analytic age ? The way to enter 



300 The Influence of Emerson 

into it is by associated action in good work. 
Emerson, always in advance, saw that the 
time had come for this a generation ago. 
That another believed, as he did not, that 
Christ turned water into wine at Cana, was 
a slight thing compared with having the 
Christ spirit in the heart. With the man 
of this spirit he had fellowship ; he had 
none with the man whose sole " religion " 
was pride in emancipation from some real 
or fancied superstition. His primary coun- 
sel to the Free Religious Association, in that 
strong speech in which he stated so clearly 
his own simple creed, was the counsel to 
sympathy and synthesis. " I think we have 
disputed long enough. I think we might 
now relinquish our theological controversies 
to communities more idle and ignorant than 
we. I am glad that a more realistic church 
is coming to be the tendency of society, 
and that we are likely one day to forget our 
obstinate polemics in the ambition to excel 
each other in good works." Emerson, it 
has been said, did us more good than any 
other among us, " first, by encouraging self- 
reliance ; and, secondly, by encouraging God- 



Emerson and Carlyle 301 

reliance." What we now also need is the 
encouragement of man-reliance, of co-opera- 
tion and fraternity ; and here also he spoke 
the prophetic word, if it was not indeed the 
burden of his gospel. Carlyle preached 
righteousness to us, and Emerson taught 
us truthfulness, and we are debtors both 
to the Jew and to the Greek ; but to these 
we need to add fellowship and brotherhood, 
— to the Judaism of Carlyle and the Plato n- 
ism of Emerson the warm Christianism and 
humanism of Mazzini, which knows God 
in its heart of hearts as our Father and our 
Mother too, and we one body and every 
one members one of another. 

Yet so much I say with misgivings and 
repentances, and remember that while, as the 
sun of the late afternoon fell on Carlyle, it 
mellowed him, and whereas, in the period 
of the " Frederick," he seemed more and 
more to deify pure will, preach blood and 
iron, and have almost no good word for 
what most of us count progress, he now 
showed greater kindness to the spirit of the 
age and let fall words which said the criti- 
cism of the forties and the fifties was too 



302 The Influence of Emerson 

harsh, — so Emerson rose steadily above 
the bare individualism which goes into the 
closet ever and shuts the door, to hear what 
the great God speaketh, into ever fuller com- 
munion with the nation and the race. Ever 
he was the pleader for humaner politics and 
more generous social institutions ; but more 
and more he saw that we must consider the 
communal problem and communal good. 
" There will dawn erelong on our politics, 
on our modes of living, a nobler morning, 
in the sentiment of love. This is the one 
remedy for all ills, the panacea of nature. 
We must be lovers, and at once the im- 
possible becomes the possible. Our age 
and history, for these thousand years, has 
not been the history of kindness, but of 
selfishness. See this wide society of labor- 
ing men and women. We allow ourselves to 
be served by them, we live apart from them, 
and meet them without a salute in the streets. 
We do not greet their talents, nor rejoice in 
their good fortune, nor foster their hopes, 
nor in the assembly of the people vote for 
what is dear to them. Thus we enact the 
part of the selfish noble and king from the 



Emerson and Carlyle 303 

foundation of the world." "The State," 
he said again, " must consider the poor man, 
and all voices must speak for him. Every 
child that is born must have a just chance 
for his bread. . . . No one should take more 
than his share." He warned the republic of 
the dangers ahead, if our social inequalities 
and injustices are not corrected, and that 
it is " better to work on institutions by the 
sun than by the wind." The same deep 
thought and feeling were at the bottom of 
Carlyle's impatience with laissez-faire and 
his preaching of strong government, which 
is why the socialist finds so many points of 
contact with him. 

The War and the uprising of the North 
had much to do with deepening in Emerson 
the communal, national, and social sense. 
They made a profound impression on him, 
gave him a new idea of men's relations to 
each other, of the value of the State, and 
of the solidarity of the race. " Emerson," 
says Lowell, "reverencing strength, seeking 
the highest outcome of the individual, has 
found that society and politics are also main 
elements in the attainment of the desired 



304 The Influence of Emerson 

end, and has drawn steadily manward and 
worldward." " Age brought with it," says 
his biographer, " an even warmer glow of in- 
terest in his fellow-men ; and the new life 
of the Republic brought to him an enlarged 
perception of the organic life of the race in 
its relations to morals and religion. He 
came to see a new value in a united religious 
life for the people, though abating no jot of 
his soul-trust." 

Thus always is Emerson his own best bal- 
ancer and correcter. A high philosophy and 
devotion to humanity, — that is the conjunc- 
tion for which the world hungers and thirsts ; 
and that conjunction is his message. If in 
some moment of new insight we except to 
this or that upon his page, so also we know 
might he ; and we suspect that he is our 
forerunner in the apprehension. Always the 
just mind, the perfect faith, the wholly ex- 
cellent spirit, the good will. The rest is but 
a question of the days and years : it does 
not touch the soul. And so all criticism is 
disarmed. This, we say, was the wise man, 
the perfect and upright ; we find in him no 
fault at all. 



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